Differentiator application in altitude control for an indoor blimp robot

ABSTRACT

This paper presents design of altitude controller with disturbance compensation for an indoor blimp robot and its realisation. Due to hardware restrictions, the altitude control behaviour of blimp is modelled as a switched system with a constant time-delay complemented with uncertain bounded disturbances. In order to achieve state estimation, four differentiators are applied and compared, then HOMD (homogeneous finite-time) differentiator is chosen as an observer for vertical velocity and switching signal estimation. Next, a predictor-based controller is conceived, and in order to compensate the perturbation, the method for disturbance evaluation is designed still with the help of HOMD differentiator. Control scheme is implemented by Matlab Simulink, and finally, the performance of blimp altitude controller is verified in experiments.

KEYWORDS:

• Differentiator
• flying robots
• output feedback control
• control of switched system

Acknowledgments

The PhD student Yue Wang is sponsored by China Scholarship Council (CSC). Thanks to our team's engineer Mr Xin Jin for his work on the development of blimp's first prototype. Thanks to Paul Lesur for his work on the communication interface between Simulink and OptiTrack and his help during tests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported in part by ANR Finite4SoS [ANR 15 CE23 0007], by the Government of Russian Federation [grant number 074-U01] and the Ministry of Education and Science of Russian Federation [Project 14.Z50.31.0031].