Robotic Airship

Project AURORA aimed at developing a robotic airship with significant levels of autonomy during all phases of its operation. This includes the ability to perform mission, navigation, and sensor deployment planning and execution, failure diagnosis and recovery, and adaptive replanning of mission tasks.

AURORA was conceived as a proof-of-concept system, to be used in low-demanding applications. The major physical subsystems are: the airship; the onboard control and navigation subsystems, including the internal sensors, hardware, and software; the communications subsystem; the mission sensors; and a mobile base station.

Aurora Ground station

On March 4th, 2000, AURORA performed one of the first unmanned airship autonomous Flight. I was flown in a military field in Campinas, Brazil. In this experiment, the airship was manually flown for a few minutes before automatic control was switched on. The mission path was defined as a square with vertices distant 150 m from each other. Wind speed was on the range of 0 to 10 km/h. The result obtained is shown below. The dotted line represents the airship motion from take-off until automa t ic control was switched on. The continuous line represents the airship motion under PI control, where one can clearly see the close adherence to the mission path. The last segment, represented as a dashed line, is the motion of the airship under manual co ntrol until landing.