Trajectory planning with minimum energy consumption for multi-target regions autonomous cruise of stratospheric airship in wind field

In the future, the stratospheric airship will be used to accomplish the continuous cruising mission in the widely distributed area. To solve the trajectory planning problem of a single airship continuously cruising multi-target regions, a global trajectory planning algorithm with the minimum energy consumption is proposed under the assumption of constant horizontal wind and cruising altitude. First, the singular perturbation method is used to plan the trajectory of the airship with minimum energy consumption in the long-distance straight cruise phase between each two target regions. This method determines the optimal yaw angle and cruising speed of the airship. Then, quadratic programming is used to solve the trajectory of the airship cruising in the target region by considering the smoothness and continuity of the airship's flight, the requirements of cruising time, and the constraints of speed and acceleration. Finally, the trajectory is optimized by considering the yaw rate constraint to strengthen the dynamic feasibility. Based on the above algorithms, we give a specific trajectory planning case in the last section. © 2023, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.