Nonlinear Control and Guidance of a Hexapropeller Airship

June 3, 2026

This thesis presents the development and validation of a complete control and guidance architecture for the Noamini hexapropeller airship, an autonomous airship intended for environmental surveillance and monitoring missions. The proposed solution considers all six propellers with fixed vectoring and it is designed to operate across the full flight envelope, encompassing both Aerodynamic Flight and Hovering Flight. Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion is adopted as the core control methodology, motivated by its reduced dependence on accurate system modeling and its robustness to uncertainties and external disturbances. Longitudinal and lateral INDI controllers are designed and validated for both flight regimes, regulating longitudinal velocity, vertical velocity, pitch angle, yaw rate and roll angle. The control architecture incorporates a Command Filter, a Second-Order Differentiator and an Input Scaling Gain to address practical implementation challenges of INDI. The guidance layer combines an altitude controller based on a weighted pseudoinverse, a L1 guidance strategy for path following in Aerodynamic Flight and a guidance strategy for Hovering Flight. The complete architecture is validated through simulations of a representative mission combining both flight regimes. A systematic study evaluates the influence of wind magnitude and direction, turbulence intensity, radius of curvature and path following velocity, establishing practical operational limits and providing a foundation for future experimental validation on the actual platform.

Authors in the community:

• 

  J

  João Diogo Nunes da Silva

  ist1100327

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  R

  Rafael de Angelis Cordeiro

  ist427116

• 

  J

  José Raul Carreira Azinheira

  ist12745

mechanical-engineering - Mechanical engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico