Aerial robots show more and more indoor applications such as surveillance and inspection. However, most existing aerial platforms such as quadcopters still lack safety and endurance during human interaction. To address the problems listed above, we develop the Georgia-Tech Miniature Autonomous Blimp, which can satisfy the indoor safety requirement with much longer flight time. In our previous work, we decomposed the autonomous flight of the GT-MAB into a set of motion primitives. However, since the lateral and longitudinal movements are highly coupled with pitch and roll motions, undesirable oscillations are often observed which cause inaccurate sensor readings, unstable video streams from an onboard camera, and a less comfortable HRI experience. With the demand for better flight behaviors and HRI experience, we established the 6-DOF motion model and identified parameters related to 3-DOF motion in a vertical plane. A flight controller, which allows the GT-MAB to have constant forward and sideway velocity with reduced oscillation, was established. In the future, a full dynamics motion model of the GT-MAB will be identified, and the flight controller will be updated at the same time.

• Q. Tao, M. Hou and F. Zhang, “Modeling and Identification of Coupled Translational and Rotational Motion of Underactuated Indoor Miniature Autonomous Blimps,” 2020 16th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), 2020, pp. 339-344, doi: 10.1109/ICARCV50220.2020.9305371.
• Q. Tao, J. Wang, Z. Xu, T. X. Lin, Y. Yuan and F. Zhang, “Swing-Reducing Flight Control System for an Underactuated Indoor Miniature Autonomous Blimp,” in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 1895-1904, Aug. 2021, doi: 10.1109/TMECH.2021.3073966.