Control System Design for a General Blimp
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Date
2019-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
A blimp is an airship without internal structure and has been used to explore unknown areas and advertisements. The blimp can be used to do a long-time flight with less energy consumption. What's more, the blimp can work with other robots to explore unknown areas. Automation and Optimization Lab has built a blimp with the utilization of Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controller. This blimp has experienced an indoor manual control test and an outdoor trajectory tracking test. During the tests, the PID controller helped the blimp finish all tasks during the indoor flight test. However, in the outdoor flight test, the blimp was unstable because the PID controller could not control the altitude and y-axis position of the blimp while the blimp tried to go forward. In addition, wind disturbance can easily influence the blimp's motion. What's more, the energy cost of the blimp could not be managed during the test. To solve the instability and energy cost problem when facing unknown disturbance, new control algorithms will be implemented for the system. Sliding Mode Control (SMC) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) are two candidates for controlling the blimp because SMC has a strong disturbance rejection ability and MPC can add constraints to energy cost. By testing two controllers' ability in controlling simulated blimp model, the performances of two controllers are summarized. For the further test, new controllers will be tested in indoor trajectory tracking test.
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Control System Design for a General Blimp