Disturbance compensation based controller for an indoor blimp robot

Abstract

This paper presents the robust controller design for an indoor blimp robot to achieve application such as the surveillance. The commonly used 6 degrees of freedom dynamic model is simplified under reasonable assumptions and decoupled into two independent parts. The blimp simplified horizontal plane movement model is complemented with disturbance terms to ensure the modeling accuracy, then it is transformed to a simpler form for the ease of controller design. Next, the disturbance terms are evaluated by the designed real-time estimator, and the perturbation estimates are compensated in the conceived motion controller for cancellation of the influence of disturbances. The performance and robustness of the disturbance compensation-based controller are verified by both simulations and experiments on the developed blimp robot. Finally, the results prove the feasibility of the blimp robot in indoor surveillance application by stabilizing itself at a fixed position or patrolling along a predefined path.