Design and Control of An Autonomous Blimp

In this study, a blimp is used for an indoor robotics application. An indoor image dataset consisting 3090 images is created by grabbing image frames from an indoor environment. These images are used to determine the position of the blimp by matching with real time grabbed frames and then to fuse this data with position result which is obtained from IMU data. Another onboard sensor is a 9DoF IMU. IMU data is obtained wireless via an XBee and Arduino board. IMU data is used to identify the blimp system in Matlab by validating experimental results with the basic dynamical model simulation results. As a part of this study, a voltage regulator circuit is designed and used onboard with 3 different voltage outputs to blimp motors, camera and IMU-Arduino-XBee. At the same time, default RC of the blimp is connected to the serial port of ground station via Arduino board and an electronic circuit to increase and regulate the input voltages of remote controller is used. On the other hand, a basic dynamical model is derived and simulated, and then results are validated with experimental results. The simulation is visualized in VRML and is compared with experimental results.