Nandan Kumar Sinha

Maneuver design is a vital prerequisite for autonomy in aerospace guidance and control. It ensures system safety by analyzing the feasibility of the proposed maneuvers. This paper demonstrates a holistic approach to maneuver design by emphasizing its feasibility with consideration on the complete dynamics of the system and its constraints. Computational bifurcation analysis is employed to generate a sequence of trim solutions based on specified state and control constraints that define a stipulated maneuver. Implementing this approach on a stratospheric airship model helps attempt a few of its challenging and interesting facets like autonomous hovering, ascending, and descending by gauging its performance and formulating realistic maneuvers pertaining to the imposed limitations on the lateral excursion, control, and state constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed maneuvers is then evaluated using numerical simulations with computed control schedules in an open-loop.

This paper describes design and development of an integrated guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) algorithm for smooth navigation of an airship following a series of planar waypoints for surveillance applications. The guidance algorithm employed in this study is a look ahead-based steering guidance law which provides the required guidance command to the controller for executing the target mission. The command signal generated by guidance law is based on the airship current location relative to the next target waypoint. Two different control architectures are used in the GNC algorithm in order to execute the guidance command and carry out the path following mission. A proportional–integral–derivative (PID) law-based outer loop kinematic controller is designed to control airship attitude/orientation, and a linear quadratic regulator (LQR)-based inner loop optimal controller is designed to control the airship’s speed and angular rates. Performance and robustness of developed GNC scheme are evaluated in MATLAB®-based simulation environment for two different flight scenarios. Results show that an optimal path following trajectory is obtained with minimum deviation from the given target waypoints.