Station-keeping of Stratospheric Aerostat with Receding Horizon Tree Search Planning Method

Abstract

The station-keeping property of stratospheric aerostat is significant for practical applications. In this work, we established the dynamics model of aerostat, then divided the wind fields into various layers according to the wind direction variation, which converted the data that wind speed continuously varies with height into a set of discrete wind layer sequences. After that, in order to realize station-keeping, the receding horizon tree search strategy was implemented to select the candidate wind layers. Finally, the station-keeping trajectory of the aerostat in dynamic wind fields was simulated. The results have shown that the proposed method could make the selection of the perpetual altitude more reasonable, and greatly reduce the computational complexity, effectively achieving the purpose of keeping the aerostat in a certain area.