Attitude control strategy of airship based on active disturbance rejection controller

The flight performance of the airship is closely related to the attitude control. For the stability of the station-keeping and the rapidity and accuracy of the trajectory tracking, it is necessary to study the attitude control of the airship. This paper proposes a strategy including two parties. First, a novel control mechanism combining moving-mass and tail vector thrust is proposed, and the airship mathematical model is introduced briefly. Second, active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is introduced which is developed from classical proportion–integration–differentiation (PID) controller. Considering the special working environment of stratospheric airship, the wind field is added to the simulation as external disturbance. The results show that the system is stable which can track any expected angle of pitch and yaw directions with small overshoot and rise time. In general, with or without the disturbance of 4 m/s wind field, the ADRC performs better than PID controller. © 2020, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.