Tracking Control of an Aerial Blimp Robot Based on Image Information

An autonomous surveillance blimp system is provided with only one camera as a sensor. Motion segmentation is used to improve automatic detection and tracking of point features on a target object. Inverse optimal tracking control is applied to an aerial blimp which is one of the underactuated systems. The controller minimizes some meaningful cost dependent on the controller, which is not given in advance, and the designed system has a stability margin which guarantees robustness with respect to input uncertainties. Some experiments are performed by using an indoor blimp.

[1]  Takanori Fukao.  Inverse optimal tracking control of a nonholonomic mobile robot , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[2]  Josué Jr. Guimarães Ramos,et al.  A semi-autonomous robotic airship for environmental monitoring missions , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[3]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  The Autonomous Blimp Project of LAAS/CNRS - Current Status , 2002, ISER.

[4]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  An Iterative Image Registration Technique with an Application to Stereo Vision , 1981, IJCAI.

[5]  B. S. Manjunath,et al.  Edge flow: A framework of boundary detection and image segmentation , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[6]  Weiping Li,et al.  Applied Nonlinear Control , 1991 .

[7]  James P. Ostrowski,et al.  Visual servoing with dynamics: control of an unmanned blimp , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[8]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Recursive Estimation of Motion, Structure, and Focal Length , 1995, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[9]  P. Khosla,et al.  Image-based visual servoing of nonholonomic mobile robots , 1999, Proceedings of the 38th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.99CH36304).

[10]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  An autonomous blimp for a surveillance system , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[11]  G.D. Hager,et al.  Toward domain-independent navigation: dynamic vision and control , 1998, Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.98CH36171).

[12]  Alexandre Bernardino,et al.  Vision based station keeping and docking for an aerial blimp , 2000, Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113).

[13]  Paul Smith,et al.  Layered motion segmentation and depth ordering by tracking edges , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[14]  Z. Artstein.  Stabilization with relaxed controls , 1983 .

[15]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  Image-based tracking control of a blimp , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[16]  Sanjiv Singh,et al.  Collection of environmental data from an airship platform , 2001, SPIE Optics East.

[17]  Eduardo Sontag.  A Lyapunov-Like Characterization of Asymptotic Controllability , 1983, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.

[18]  Henk Nijmeijer,et al.  Tracking Control of Mobile Robots: A Case Study in Backstepping , 1997, Autom..