Disturbance-Aware Flight Control of Robotic Gliding Blimp via Moving Mass Actuation

TL;DR

This paper presents a disturbance-aware control framework for robotic blimps using moving mass actuation, combining real-time wind estimation with predictive control to improve stability in windy conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated MHE-MPC control scheme that explicitly models and compensates for wind disturbances in LTA aerial systems.

Findings

Significantly improved stability under wind disturbances.

Effective real-time wind estimation with MHE.

Enhanced trajectory control compared to baseline methods.

Abstract

Robotic blimps, as lighter-than-air (LTA) aerial systems, offer long endurance and inherently safe operation but remain highly susceptible to wind disturbances. Building on recent advances in moving mass actuation, this paper addresses the lack of disturbance-aware control frameworks for LTA platforms by explicitly modeling and compensating for wind-induced effects. A moving horizon estimator (MHE) infers real-time wind perturbations and provides these estimates to a model predictive controller (MPC), enabling robust trajectory and heading regulation under varying wind conditions. The proposed approach leverages a two-degree-of-freedom (2-DoF) moving-mass mechanism to generate both inertial and aerodynamic moments for attitude and heading control, thereby enhancing flight stability in disturbance-prone environments. Extensive flight experiments under headwind and crosswind conditions show that the integrated MHE-MPC framework significantly outperforms baseline PID control, demonstrating its effectiveness for disturbance-aware LTA flight.