AUA Prototype

ABSTRACT

Autonomous Unmanned Airship Prototype

Soyeb Dalal, Lambert Le, Sagar Patel, Siddhartha Kattoju

UAVs have been traditionally developed and used by the military and thus have been prohibitively expensive for civilian use. The objective of this project is to develop a low cost autonomous airborne robot which can survey the environment in which it is deployed keeping in mind civilian use-cases. Potential applications include everything from supporting search and rescue operations in the aftermath of natural disasters to adventure sport photography. Most UAV based research has focused largely on rotor powered vehicles. Rotor craft, while being very agile, are difficult to control, have very short flying times and are potentially hazardous during collisions. This project explores the use of a helium inflated airship as safer and lower cost alternative. This project proposes a design for an autonomous unmanned airship prototype that can stream video back to a ground station. The initial prototype will be able to operate indoors and may be used as a mobile surveillance platform in high ceiling environments such as airports, malls and sports stadiums.

Key Words: UAV, blimp, wifi, video

http://www.ece.concordia.ca/currentstudents/undergraduatestudents/capstone/

http://www.ece.concordia.ca/currentstudents/undergraduatestudents/capstone/doc/CapstoneOrientation2010.pdf