The Autonomous Blimp Project of LAAS-CNRS: Achievements in Flight Control and Terrain Mapping

Abstract

In this paper we provide a progress report of the LAAS-CNRS project of autonomous blimp robot development, in the context of field robotics. Hardware developments aimed at designing a generic and versatile experimental platform are first presented. On this base, the flight control and terrain mapping issues, which constitute the main thrust of the research work, are presented in two parts. The first part, devoted to the automatic control study, is based on a rigorous modeling of the airship dynamics. Considering the decoupling of the lateral and longitudinal dynamics, several flight phases are identified for which appropriate control strategies are proposed. The description focuses on the lateral steady navigation. In the second part of the paper, we present work on terrain mapping with lowaltitude stereovision. A simultaneous localization and map building approach based on an extended Kalman filter is depicted, with details on the identification of the various errors involved in the process. Experimental results show that positioning in the three-dimensional space with a centimeter accuracy can be achieved, thus allowing the possibility to build high-resolution digital elevation maps.

Autonomous blimp control using model-free reinforcement learning in a continuous state and action space

“…For example, Varella Gomes and Ramos [19] as well as Hygounenc et al [8] describe the physical principles of airship operations and use the non-linear dynamics to control several flight phases from takeoff to landing. Zhang and Ostrowski [21] use a vision-guided blimp combined with a PID controller.…”

Modeling And Robust Sliding Mode Control Of A Kind Airship Aircraft

“…Literature [2] used traditional PID control method to design a inside and outside controller for little perturbation linear system. Literature [3] decoupled airship nonlinear model with six degree of freedom into the vertical and horizontal movement model and used PI control method to study trajectory-tracking problem of airship.…”

Dynamics Modeling and Simulation of Flexible Airships

“…In order to capture the coupling between the aerodynamic forces and the structural elasticity, local velocity on the deformed vehicle is used in the computation of aerodynamic forces. [2][3][4][5][6][7].…”