Miniature Autonomous Blimps for Indoor Applications

Abstract

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1834.vid Miniature autonomous blimps are autonomous lighter-than-air vehicles that offer a variety of benefits over other existing flight platforms. In particular, blimps offer long flight times, soft envelopes that are resilient to collisions, and friendly human-robot interaction opportunities. As such, these platforms are well suited for indoor applications and human-cluttered environments as catastrophic or life-threatening collisions are far less likely. In this abstract, we detail some of our ongoing efforts to enable autonomous behaviors for lighter-than-air platforms through various sensing, actuation, and swarming efforts.