Closed-loop control experiments for a blimp robot consisting of four-divided envelopes

A new blimp robot is developed to make a rise or descent movement easy, where four partial envelopes are arranged, centering on a gondola, and four propellers are attached around the gondola. After reviewing the structure of the proposed new body, called X4-blimp, describing the motions as the X4-blimp and several parts required as an autonomous robot, the present research mainly explains on closed-loop control of the developed blimp. In particular, a PD type closed-loop controller is designed to control basic motions, such as translational motion, pitch motion, and yaw motion, as well as describing a system model and an observation model for an extended Kalman filter with a quaternion kinematics. The usefulness of the blimp robot developed is demonstrated through some experiments with an actual prototype robot.