Simple tuning for an adaptive and model-free control of indoor airships

Salas Gordoniz, Jorge Esteban, Saad, Maarouf and St-Onge, David. 2025. « Simple tuning for an adaptive and model-free control of indoor airships ». Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, vol. 20, nº 8.

PDF St-Onge-D-2025-31146.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted access to Repository staff only until 14 July 2026. Use licence: Creative Commons CC BY. Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenges involved in designing and tuning flight controllers for uncrewed aerial vehicles, focusing on the complexities specific to lighter-than-air vehicles, often referred to as blimps. Traditional approaches often require numerous iterations in both simulation and real-world environments to identify dynamic model parameters (such as mass, inertia, and damping) and to fine-tune controller gains to achieve stable flights. In contrast, we propose a streamlined methodology that leverages intuitive physics principles to simplify the control, tuning, and stabilization process, ensuring safe and robust path tracking for indoor blimps. Our approach incorporates sliding mode control (SMC) with a saturation term to regulate translational motion across all three axes as well as yaw, while limiting both cruising speeds and control forces. Additionally, we employ a recursive simple moving average (SMA) mechanism that reduces steady-state errors in real-time, enabling altitude control in response to weight changes and adjusting speed to compensate for drag. To further enhance stability, an SMA-based stabilization technique dampens oscillations that naturally occur around the pitch and roll axes, improving performance during both hovering and flight. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of this method, demonstrating its robustness, rapid deployment, path accuracy, and oscillation control, all with minimal tuning effort.

Item Type:	Peer reviewed article published in a journal
Professor:	Professor Saad, Maarouf St-Onge, David
Affiliation:	Génie électrique, Génie mécanique
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2025 20:31
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2025 13:30
URI:	https://espace2.etsmtl.ca/id/eprint/31146

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