Path-following control of an underactuated stratospheric airship with unknown dynamics and external disturbances using time-delay control

In this paper, the path-following problem for an underactuated stratospheric airship with unknown dynamics and external disturbances has been studied. Vector field guidance is employed to fix the underactuated issue and generate desired heading. Time-delay control (TDC) is utilised to track desired states and estimate the model uncertain and disturbances using simple delayed states. To compensate time-delay estimation (TDE) errors, terminal sliding-mode is utilised and combined with TDC. The stability of the proposed controller is provided by using Lyapunov function. A numerical simulation is demonstrated to prove the performance of the proposed control algorithm.