Control of an Aerial Blimp Based on Visual Input

This paper describes a method for controlling a lighter-than-air robotic vehicle based on visual input. Due to the motion disturbances in the environment (currents), these tasks are important to keep the vehicle stabilized relative to an external reference frame. The main diculties are related to the non-holonomic constraints of the blimp moving in 3D, having a limited number of controllable degrees of freedom. The relative position of the vehicle with respect to a docking station is tracked using vision. A planar surface is chosen as a reference plane which allows visual tracking of an environmental region, based on planar projective transformations. The observed image deformations of the tracked surface reveal the camera motion parameters, from which the vehicles pose can be reconstructed. This information is used to realize non-linear feedback control. Experiments and results are described and discussed