Control of autonomous airship

Scientific research and development on the control of autonomous airship have shown a significant growth in recent years. New applications appear in the areas such as freight carrier, advertising, monitoring, surveillance, transportation, military and scientific research. The control of Autonomous airship is a very important problem for the aerial robots research. In this paper, the previous research on the control of autonomous blimp is reviewed, Several popular control methods are categorized and discussed in detail. Then an intelligent navigation control method, reinforcement learning control, is introduced in the autonomous blimp which was used for 2007 UAV Outback Challenge. The future work on intelligent airship control is also outlined.