Automatic Landing Control of Outdoor Blimp Robots

A surveillance system is required to gather the suffering information in the stricken area safely after large-scale disasters. An autonomous blimp is the best option for this purpose. This paper proposes a control design method for automatic landing of outdoor blimp robots. The landing method consists of stabilizing control in horizontal plane and longitudinal control for letdown-velocity and pitching motion of the blimp. The states of the kinematic model are transformed to design a time-varying stabilizing controller in horizontal plane to constrain the blimp motion. Some simulations and experiments are performed to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method by using an outdoor blimp whose length is 12m.