Project AURORA: Development of an Autonomous Unmanned Remote Monitoring Robotic Airship

Abstract

Robotic UAVs have an enormous potential as obser-vation and data-gathering platforms for a wide va-riety of applications. Robotic airships, in particu-lar, are of great interest for environmental monitor-ing and inspection applications. This paper provides an overview of Project AURORA (Autonomous Un-manned Remote Monitoring Robotic Airship), a re-search effort that focuses on the development of the technologies required for substantially autonomous robotic airships. The authors treat airborne and ground hardware and software infrastructures; air-ship dynamic modeling and simulation; control and guidance methods; visual servoing strategies; robotic air-ground cooperation; dynamic target recognition; and hybrid airship robotic software architecture. Suc-cessful airship autonomous flight achieved through a set of pre-defined way points and simulation results of ongoing work are also presented.