Application of neural network for airship take-off and landing system by buoyancy change

For long time, the takeoff and landing control of airship was worked by human handling. With the development of the autonomous control system, the exact controls during the takeoff and landing were required and lots of methods and algorithms were suggested. This paper presents the result of airship take-off and landing by buoyancy control using air ballonet volume change and performance control of pitch angle for stable flight within the desired altitude. For the complexity of airship's dynamics, firstly, simple PID controller was applied. Due to the various atmospheric conditions, this controller didn’t give satisfactory results. Therefore, new control method was designed to reduce rapidly the error between designed trajectory and actual trajectory by learning algorithm using an artificial neural network. Generally, ANN has various weaknesses such as large training time, selection of neuron and hidden layer numbers required to deal with complex problem. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, the RBFN (radial basis function network) controller developed.