Autonomous Flight Experiment with a Robotic Unmanned Airship

Project AURORA aims at the development of an unmanned airship capable of autonomous flight over user-defined locations for aerial inspection and imagery acquisition. In this article the authors report a successful autonomous flight achieved through a set of pre-defined points, one of the first of its kind in the literature. The guidance control strategy is based on a path tracking error generation methodology that takes into account both the distance and the angular errors of the airship with respect to the desired trajectory. The control strategy uses a PI controller for the tail surfaces' deflection.