A Fast Convergence Super‐Twisting Observer Design for an Autonomous Airship

Abstract Airships are often under the risk of external disturbances, for example, the wind. The accurate external disturbance of the airship are hard to acquire. Typically, the super‐twisting observer can track the states for mechanical systems and could be used as an external disturbance tracker. However, the convergence rate of the traditional super‐twisting observer is very slow and the observed states often oscillate heavily. We modified the traditional super‐twisting observer by adding more variables to the sliding surface, and adding parameters to the newly added variables. Simulation results illustrates that the new proposed observer is able to reduce the convergence time and reduce overshoot greatly, improving the performance of the observer.