Smoothly Gain-Scheduled Control of a Tri-Turbofan Airship

Designing a controller for the full nonlinear model of an aircraft remains a challenging task. The main purpose of this work is to present a new linearization-based gain-scheduled controller synthesis technique that allows the systematic design of compact smoothly interpolated controllers that perform efficiently even for such a complex plant. Another appealing feature of the new approach is that design specifications can be easily translated into synthesis constraints, thus considerably facilitating the design task. The validity of the proposed synthesis technique is corroborated by a challenging case study in which the objective is to design a controller for the coupled six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear model of a low-altitude tri-turbofan airship subject to atmospheric disturbances.