Abstract
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. A smooth and time-varying coordinate transformation is utilized to reduce the stabilization problem of the airship to that of a simple linear time-invariant system. A new feedback controller is presented for obtaining global exponential stabilization of both the position and orientation of an underactuated airship. The proposed design method is simple and straightforward. Some flight experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
