Small Unmanned Airship Flight Control System Design

Airship, which is a Lighter-Than-Air vehicle, is widely applied both in military andcivil areas. But the airship usually requires either an onboard pilot or ground crew to operate the craftwhile in flight, which limits the application environment of airship. Therefore many organizations beginto make research, hoped that airship can be separated from the manual intervention and voluntarilycomplete the aerial mission. In order to become the automatic airship, it needs to design the flightcontrol system which is the core of unmanned airship, and it determines various flightperformances. Therefore much research work is required for flight control system.This paper takes the airship as the research object, developing a flight control systemthat demonstrates the feasibility of fully autonomous airships using experimental andsimulation, as well as providing a base for further research. In the first part of the paper,the airship flight principle is introduced, and according to the structure characteristic ofairship which is selected, equation of motion of small autonomous airship is present. Thengeneral design of the flight control system is introduced. After that, the hardware of flightcontrol system is designed, including hardware selection and the hardware circuit design.Furthermore, the software function modules are compiled and debugging work is cardedon. Each kind of problems which are met in the debugging has been solved, enabling eachfunction module to complete the request the function. Finally, according to established theairship equation of motion, the paper unifies the calculated example to research the flightcontrol rule. By using the simulation, the paper demonstrates the influence of control rulewhich is selected to the airship.