Design and real-time simulation of high-altitude/long-endurance airship flight control system

摘要

In recent years, high-altitude/long-endurance (HALE) airship platforms have generated great interest as a means to provide communications and surveillance capabilities using a relatively inexpensive flight platform. One of the challenges of HALE airship design is the development of flight control system. Modeling, flight control law design and real-time simulation platform construction for a conceptual high altitude long endurance airship are studied in this paper. The nonlinear six degree-of-freedom (DOF) dynamic equations of the airship with added mass and inertia are developed using Matlab, and linear models are extracted from it. Flight control laws are designed for geostationary positioning. A real-time open architecture flight simulation system was developed using commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and popular software. By using automatic code generate technique, the system drastically reduced expenses for high-fidelity simulations without abandoning quality. The simulation system is flexible enough to allow expansion and reconfiguration and later can accomplish hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation.