Station-keeping of the Autonomous Airship Using Adaptive Pursuit Guidance Law

The long-endurance station-keeping capability makes the autonomous airship a desirable platform to provide communication and surveillance services. An adaptive pursuit guidance law is proposed to realize the station-keeping of the airship under the influence of the unknown wind. The wind speed is estimated by an adaptive mechanism which is incorporated with the pursuit guidance law to guarantee the convergence to the mission site and realize station-keeping flight with the airspeed equal to the wind speed. The information required by the guidance law is easy to obtain. The results of the simulation show the effectiveness of the adaptive pursuit guidance law.