A Novel Design and Implementation of an Autopilot Terrain-Following Airship

Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAV) have been utilized in many application domains. UAVs (or Airships, e.g., Drones) have been adopted to explore resources (e.g., minerals). One of the main limitations of using such airships is that flying at a fixed altitude is based on GPS altitude information. In many applications, it is important to support the ‘terrain-following flying’ function for airships when deployed and utilized in areas where the terrain is not flat but bumpy and steep (for example, in mountains areas in South Korea). This paper proposed a novel architecture of an airship autopilot system with three main contributions: First, the proposed architecture is designed to support a terrain-following function using a laser range finder (which continuously identifies the distance between an airship and terrain). Second, the proposed system provides two new algorithms for path and terrain-following functions for the proposed architecture. Third, this work designed and implemented a prototype airship and autopilot system to validate the proposed method. As a result, the proposed airship design and algorithm can guarantee a high-quality data collection (e.g., magnetic data) and demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach with the experimental results based on real-flight operation in a test area.