Design of flight control system for a robotic blimp

Robotic blimps present an enormous potential for applications in low-speed and low-altitude exploration, surveillance, and monitoring, as well as telecommunication relay platforms. To make our lighter-than-air platform a robotic blimp with significant levels of autonomy, the decoupled longitude and latitude dynamic model are developed, and the hardware and software of the flight control system are designed. The onboard hardware consists of blimp state observer, actuators, MCU, etc. The software functions include signals processing, data filtering and fault tolerance, ground command execution, etc. Based on decoupled dynamic model, the control system architecture is presented, and navigation strategy for waypoint flight problem is discussed. The paper gives results of a flight experiment using the designed flight control system, and the results manifests that the system is applicable and initial machine intelligence of robotic blimp is achieved.