Outdoor blimp robots for rescue surveillance systems

A surveillance system is required to gather the suffering information in the stricken area safely and quickly after large-scale disasters. An autonomous blimp is the best option for this purpose. The control design method, which consists of long straight trajectory tracking control, turning control in a horizontal plane, and longitudinal control to keep the altitude, is proposed. Inverse optimal tracking control is applied for the blimp to keep a desired long straight trajectory, which is based on reference velocity field. The designed system is robust to input uncertainties. As longitudinal control, LQ optimal control is designed for the linearized model whose system parameters are obtained by parameter identification. Some experiments are performed to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method by using an outdoor blimp whose length is 12 m.