VASC Seminar Announcement
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Date: Monday, 12/10/01
Time: 3:30-4:40
Place: NSH 1507

Title:  Visual Servo Control of a Miniature Blimp

Speaker:  Pragyan Mishra

Abstract:  A miniature blimp is an indoor aerial vehicle consisting of
helium balloons less than 100cm. across and 0.075 cubic meters
in volume with payload capacities of under 100grams. These
platforms have very limited navigational ability and on-board
power. The under-actuated aerial vehicles can travel down
corridors and indoor environments where there are severe
restrictions on space. These low-speed robots can be used
for tasks ranging from indoor surveillance to mapping
of indoor 3D environments. However, control of such a
low-powered vehicle based on a limited number of sensors,
a single camera in our case, is a difficult task. I will
present a visual servoing strategy that exploits the non-
holonomic nature of the blimp to determine its egomotion.
I will discuss both geometry-based and jacobian-based motion
control strategies and show how the blimp can be steered
to specified feature points. A simple time-varying feedback
that is used to stabilize this under-actuated platform will
be shown.