Command-filtered backstepping control for a multi-vectored thrust stratospheric airship

A stratospheric airship is an airship flying at a high altitude of 20 km as a stratospheric platform. Due to the low atmospheric density and flight speed, the efficiency of a conventional actuator, such as an aerodynamic control surface, is decreased. Thus, a new multi-vectored thrust airship called a flat peach is discussed in this paper. This article describes the derivation, design and simulation implementation of a non-linear controller for an airship with multi-vector thrust. The controller is designed using a command-filtered, vector backstepping approach, and can set the airship track three Cartesian positions (x, y, z) and yaw angle to their desired values and stabilize the pitch and roll angles. The controller is non-linear to address the kinematics and airship dynamics. The approach guarantees exponential stability of a compensated tracking error in the sense of Lyapunov. Both the stability analysis and simulation results are included.