A flight control and navigation system of a small size unmanned airship

Unmanned airships present an enormous potential for low-speed and low-altitude exploration applications. In order to develop a flight robot based on a small size unmanned remotely controlled airship, a flight and navigation system is presented in this paper. The hardware and software of the system are designed. As the kernel of the system, the flight control and navigation strategies are detailed. On the basis of the airship dynamic model, the architecture of the control system is presented, and the fuzzy controllers are employed and optimized using an improved genetic algorithm. Based on the airship model and the control and navigation strategies, the simulation studies of 3D path tracking problem are given and analyzed.