An autonomous blimp for a surveillance system

Author

Fukao, Takanori ; Fujitani, Kazushi ; Kanade, Takeo

Author_Institution

Inst. of Robotics, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Volume

2

fYear

2003

fDate

27-31 Oct. 2003

Firstpage

1820

Abstract

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.

Keywords

aircraft navigation; cameras; feature extraction; image sequences; position control; remotely operated vehicles; state estimation; surveillance; tracking; Lucas-Kanade algorithm; autonomous blimp; camera; feature detection; feature tracking; image sequences; position-based control; state estimation; structure-from-motion algorithm; surveillance system; tracking controller; unmanned blimp; Cameras; Computer vision; Helicopters; Image generation; Informatics; Monitoring; Robot vision systems; State estimation; Surveillance; Target tracking;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2003. (IROS 2003). Proceedings. 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7860-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2003.1248908

Filename

1248908