An Autonomous Blimp for the Wall Following Control

This paper presents the wall following control of a small indoor airship (blimp). The purpose of the wall following control is that a blimp maintains its position and pose and flies along the wall. A blimp has great inertia and it is affected by temperature, atmospheric pressure, disturbance and air flow around blimp. In order to fly indoors, a volume of blimp should be small. The volume of a blimp becomes small then the buoyancy of a blimp should be smaller. Therefore, it is difficult to attach additional equipments on the blimp which are necessary to control blimp. For these reasons, it is difficult to control the pose and position of the blimp during the wall following. In our research, to cope with its defects, we developed new blimp. Generally, a blimp is controlled by using rudders and elevators, however our developed blimp has no rudders and elevators, and it has faster responses than general blimps. Our developed blimp is designed to smoothly follow the wall by using low-cost small ultra sonic sensors instead of high-cost sensors. Finally, the controller is designed to robustly control the pose and position of the blimp which could control in spite of arbitrary disturbance during the wall following, and the effectiveness of the controller is verified by experiment.