Duckiefloat: a Collision-Tolerant Resource-Constrained Blimp for Long-Term Autonomy in Subterranean Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces Duckiefloat, a collision-tolerant, resource-constrained blimp designed for long-term subterranean search and rescue, emphasizing low power, autonomy, and minimal communication for effective underground exploration.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel autonomous blimp system tailored for subterranean environments, integrating collision tolerance, resource constraints, and failure-aware algorithms for extended missions.

Findings

Successful demonstration of long-term subterranean navigation

Effective collision-tolerance in constrained environments

Minimal communication approach for situational awareness

Abstract

There are several challenges for search and rescue robots: mobility, perception, autonomy, and communication. Inspired by the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge, we propose an autonomous blimp robot, which has the advantages of low power consumption and collision-tolerance compared to other aerial vehicles like drones. This is important for search and rescue tasks that usually last for one or more hours. However, the underground constrained passages limit the size of blimp envelope and its payload, making the proposed system resource-constrained. Therefore, a careful design consideration is needed to build a blimp system with on-board artifact search and SLAM. In order to reach long-term operation, a failure-aware algorithm with minimal communication to human supervisor to have situational awareness and send control signals to the blimp when needed.