Development of the research platform of small autonomous blimp robot

摘要

Abstract Blimp robots are an attractive form of small flight robot because they are maintained aloft by buoyancy, are safe, require little energy and have relatively long flight times. The development of a general‐purpose blimp robot research platform allowing modular installation of a variety of hardware and software components will lower the barrier to the creation of new research projects and increase project efficiency. This paper describes the development of such a general‐purpose platform and the testing of its suitability for research use. Experiments performed on the platform included: (1) testing of position maintenance capabilities, and changeover from a PID control software module to a learning control module; (2) testing of the ease and effectiveness of exchanging one hardware module (a microphone) for another (a camera); (3) installation of a new hardware module (a microphone) along with an existing module (a camera); (4) testing of addition of functions and performance of a topologic map generation experiment with addition of an ultrasonic sensor. The effectiveness of information fusion combined with a layered software structure was demonstrated in the experiments, indicating that the newly developed platform will be effective in promoting research on blimp robots. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 91(2): 1–13, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.10025