Toshihiko Takaya

Vision-based positioning system for indoor blimp robot

Abstract In most research on blimp robots, blimp robots have moved in a narrow space or 2-dimensional plane because perception of 3-dimensional positional information is a difficult technology to develop, even though practical blimp robots have to fly in a wide 3-dimensional environment. However, we need to experiment in wide 3-dimensional spaces for developing the control methods for practical blimp robots. In this paper we propose a positioning system for a vision-based blimp robot where blimp robots can widely fly in 3-dimensional space using simple image processing algorithms and positional information calculation.

Cooperative control of multiple neural networks for an indoor blimp robot

We report on the cooperative control of multiple neural networks for an indoor blimp robot. In our research group, the indoor blimp robot has been studied to achieve various flying robot applications. The objective of this article is to propose a robust controller that can adapt to mechanical accidents such as the breakdown of propellers. In our proposed method, each propeller thrust is independently calculated by a small neural network. We confirm the advantage of the proposed method against the control by a single large neural network.

Learning landing control of an indoor blimp robot for self-energy recharging

We report on learning landing control for the self-energy recharging of indoor blimp robots. Indoor blimp robots have potential applications in monitoring, surveillance, and entertainment. It might be necessary for blimp robots to fly for a long time to achieve these tasks. Since blimp robots cannot have a heavy battery, it is difficult to fly for long time. Therefore, we solved this problem by developing self-energy recharging control, i.e., docking to an energy charging station. We call it landing control. We introduce a way to learn landing control to tackle an unstable flying condition. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the landing control.