Robust Global Exponential Stabilization of an Underactuated Airship

This paper considers the problem of controlling both the planar position and orientation of an underactuated airship with a reduced number of actuators. The airship is a nonholonomic system described by a set of nonlinear equations and the dynamics are subject to bounded uncertainties. A smooth and time-varying coordinate transformation is utilized to reduce the stabilization problem of the airship to that of a linear time-invariant system. A new robust feedback controller is presented for obtaining global exponential stabilization of the airship in the presence of the plant uncertainties. The proposed design method is simple and straightforward. Experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. Copyright © 2005 IFAC