Autonomous Airship a.k.a Project Sentinel

The history of hot air balloons is a little over 200 years and that of winged flight is hardly a100 years old. But mans’ quest to do just a bit more with better reliability is never ending.

Unmanned flight (UAV) is now about 50 years old with earliest military drones going back to the Vietnam War in the 60’s, mostly as decoys to fool the newly field Russian SAM-1 & 2 guided missiles that could chase aircraft and shoot them down. UAVs for resonance date back to about 30 years developed by Israel in the aftermath of the Yom-Kippur 73 war to the armed Predator UAVs as late as early 2000’s.

With humanity working towards an energy efficient world we intend to take this idea into the field of UAV’s. We plan to do this by designing and fabricating an Autonomous Blimp Air Ship.

Our objective is to design and fabricate an autonomous electric powered Airship whose primary objective is to take off and stabilize at a user defined altitude providing HQ with surveillance footage and position and orientation data while its secondary objective is way point navigation using GPS coordinates.

Our design of the Airship gets its lift from two different phenomenon’s; The Airship maintains its altitude through static lift provided by Archimedes principle of buoyancy i.e. by filling its balloon envelope with a lighter than air gas like hydrogen or helium which displaces sufficient air to make the blimp rise or at neutral buoyancy remain static hence the economy in energy consumption. The powered lift for maneuvering the blimp is provided by twin propellers mounted on a rotatable axle.

The core mechanical design is a Motor Control & payload Platform (gondola) for the blimp; we are to design a structure and its associated actuator control mechanisms. The limiting factor for the M.C.P mechanism is that it has to be very light weight and yet sturdy enough to handle the thrust from the propellers. 

One of the more amazing parts of this project is that it handles quite a large and complex array of sensors that provide the system with information about its position, orientation, and heading using sensors fusion. Since the GPS, IMU, pressure based altimeter and electronic compass provide overlapping sensor data, we amalgamate this data using filtering and fusion algorithms to get accurate data values.

The project utilizes parallel processing technique by implementing a multi-controller environment i.e. dividing the actuators, processing, mission, wireless communication, sensor data acquisition and filtering responsibility among three micro controllers.

The actuator control of this project revolves around the control of servo motors, brushless and brushed DC motors, their speed and direction.

At the end we are designing a light GUI that displays its airship health, position data using broadband video down link and a zigbee radio for two way  telemetry and tele-command.

The project is being undertaken by the Project Team L.A.A.A.S at Air University Islamabad under the supervision and guidance of Professor M.Usman Rafique and is sponsored by East West Infiniti (PVT) ™ and guided by Dr. Haroon Javed Qureshi.