Autonomous Airship

Introduction

This page shows the progress of the development of a Lighter-Than-Air autonomous Air Ship “Sentinel”. It contains the design and fabrication process of a Lighter-Than-Air Autonomous Blimp Air Ship which has the capability to takeoff and stabilize at a user defined altitude autonomously using different kinds of sensors. It is equipped with a pay load of a camera which sends live video feed to the base station using wireless communication.

Objectives of this project are:

1. Design and fabricate a stable Blimp Air Ship.

2. Integrate sensors for different control parameters and actuators with a microcontroller system.

3. Design a control system which enables the Air Ship to take off autonomously and stabilize at a user defined altitude as shown in figure 1.

4. Design a user friendly system to relay wireless commands to the blimp and receive a video feed

System Block Diagram

Component Block Diagram

Component List

Conclusion

The blimp airship with an automatic control is designed to take-off and hover after maintaining a user defined altitude.The compass is used for maintaining the attitude of the airship. IMU is used to obtain position, angular and linear velocities. GPS helped us finding the position in latitude and longitude. Altimeter measures the temperature and pressure and finds the altitude. The airship is an under-actuated system so less actuators are used to obtain the maximum degree of freedom. The twin propellers are used to take-off and stabilize the airship at the required altitude by controlling the pitching motion. The tail rotor controls the yawing motion of the airship. As for the rolling motion, it is passively controlled by the buoyancy force due to a big and wide envelope filled with light gas. For controlling the system, PD control is implemented in real time which minimizes the errors and gives the exact working of the project. The payload camera is static and held downwards to give the video feed-back to the ground. GUI demonstrates the exact location of the airship by using latitude and longitude in Google Maps and also displays the video feed-back from the camera.

In the given timeline, the envelope could not be arranged so field testing was not possible. Functionality and control of the project are demonstrated by providing a fixed lift force manually so that system was having negative buoyancy (needed a few newton lift to take off). In this test scenario, Pitch control, altitude control and yaw control were demonstrated using automatic control (PD control).

Project Status

The project has been completed as a final year project. It may be continued at the sponsoring organization i.e. East West Infiniti (Pvt) Limited.

Acknowledgment

This project was funded by East West Inifinti (Pvt) Limited. We would like to thank them for their financial and technical support.

Team

Tayyab Rehman

Zunaira Aamer

Ansab Sheikh

S. M. Yousaf Shah

Ahmed Murtaza Qureshi

Supervisor

M. Usman Rafique

The detailed project report will be available soon.