Identification of Airship Aerodynamic Models from Flight Data: Preliminary Investigation and Identifiability Analysis

In this research, a preliminary identification testing of some modelling parameters pertaining to the aerodynamic model proposed by Munk-Jones-DeLaurier for airships has been carried out. Identification trials have been carried out in virtual environment employing an output-error method, solving a non-linear optimization problem on the norm of the error between the output of an estimated model and that corresponding to a reference model, assumed as ground-truth. The practical results show how some of parameters in the aerodynamic model appear identifiable even employing a rather limited dataset also in presence of noise.