User Based Design and Evaluation Pipeline for Indoor Airships

TL;DR

This paper presents a user-centric design and evaluation pipeline for indoor airships, enabling non-experts to quickly create and assess custom blimps through open-source tools and performance analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a modular hardware and software framework for rapid airship design and a systematic evaluation system for performance characterization.

Findings

Open-source design tools facilitate quick airship customization.

The evaluation system accurately predicts performance across design variations.

Case studies validate the system's feasibility and effectiveness.

Abstract

Designing a controllable airship for non-expert users or preemptively evaluating the performance of desired airships has always been a very challenging problem. This paper explores the blimp design parameter space from the aspect of the user by considering various distributions of thrust, combinations of propulsive mechanisms, and balloon shapes. We provide open-source modular hardware and reconfigurable software design tools that allow inexperienced users to design a custom airship in a short time. Based on these design parameters, this paper develops a more engineering-focused evaluation system that can characterize the performance of different indoor blimps. An analytical comparison and some case studies that consider various points in the design parameter space have been conducted to prove the feasibility and validity of our design and evaluation system.