Unmanned airships for emergency management

There are keen demands of robotic technologies in management of many kinds of emergencies. In this paper, we argue that unmanned airships present a unique potential in emergency management cycle, and their applications for surveillance, search and rescue, and communication are discussed. To make our lighter-than-air platform an autonomous airship with significant levels of autonomy for emergency management, the hardware infrastructure and software of the flight control system are designed and detailed. Based on a decoupled longitude and latitude dynamic model, the control architecture is developed, and a fuzzy control strategy is applied in mission path following problem. An application case of target searching using the autonomous airship is given and analyzed.