Longitudinal Motion Simulation of Stratospheric Airship Under Dynamic Response of Moving-Mass Actuator

In this paper, a design method of moving-mass stratospheric airship with constant total mass is presented, and the general dynamics equation based on Newton-Euler method is derived. Considering the time-delay of the slider command response and the dynamic coupling to the airship’s state parameters, a position tracking controller with input and state constraints was designed to make the dynamic response system of the slider have critical damping characteristics. By taking the longitudinal attitude motion of moving-mass stratospheric airship as the research object, parametric modeling and attitude control simulation were carried out, and the attitude control ability of moving-mass control under different mass ratios was analyzed. The simulation results show that the attitude control ability is not affected by airspeed, and the mass ratio of slider is the main factor affecting the attitude control ability. The parameters of the slider controller have a direct influence on the dynamic performance of attitude control and also determine the dynamic coupling level of the airship. Compared with the attitude control based on the aerodynamic control surface, moving-mass control can make the airspeed and attack angle converged to the initial state at the steady state, and keep a good aerodynamic shape.