SBlimp: Design, Model, and Translational Motion Control for a Swing-Blimp

TL;DR

This paper introduces SBlimp, a hybrid aerial vehicle combining a quadrotor and helium balloon, with a novel control strategy that directly manages translational velocity, enabling stable movement regardless of orientation.

Contribution

The paper presents a new control approach for a hybrid quadrotor-helium balloon vehicle that directly controls linear velocity, differing from traditional attitude-based methods.

Findings

Stable translational motion achieved in simulations and experiments.

The control strategy maintains stability regardless of vehicle orientation.

Numerical analysis confirms the stability of the proposed control method.

Abstract

We present an aerial vehicle composed of a custom quadrotor with tilted rotors and a helium balloon, called SBlimp. We propose a novel control strategy that takes advantage of the natural stable attitude of the blimp to control translational motion. Different from cascade controllers in the literature that controls attitude to achieve desired translational motion, our approach directly controls the linear velocity regardless of the heading orientation of the vehicle. As a result, the vehicle swings during the translational motion. We provide a planar analysis of the dynamic model, demonstrating stability for our controller. Our design is evaluated in numerical simulations with different physical factors and validated with experiments using a real-world prototype, showing that the SBlimp is able to achieve stable translation regardless of its orientation.