Airship Pitch Control with Composite Nonlinear Feedback

This paper illustrates the design of composite nonlinear feedback controller for pitch control of an airship. Based on a linearized longitudinal motion model, a composite nonlinear feedback control law is constructed to improve the transient performance of the closed-loop system. To illustrate the improvement of the transient performance, the composite nonlinear feedback control law is compared with the PID control laws in the literature by considering the performance on both disturbance rejection and tracking. The simulation comparison shows that the composite nonlinear feedback controller can improve the transient performance significantly by carefully designing the linear feedback part and the nonlinear function in the control law.