An autonomous blimp for a surveillance system

An autonomous blimp for a surveillance system, which is circling around a specified target with only one camera, is designed in this paper. For this purpose, an extension of Lucas-Kanade algorithm for detection and tracking of features with rotation and scaling is provided, and a simplified structure-from-motion algorithm is applied to improve the accuracy of state estimation. A tracking controller is designed for the blimp which is an underactuated system. The desired path of the blimp is also generated from image information of a target. The blimp flies around the target automatically, after a commander sets it. Some experiments are performed indoors by using an aerial blimp.

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