Autonomous Navigation: Helium Airship

Autonomous Navigation – Helium Airship: This book gives a comprehensive account of the design and development of a GPS based auto-navigation system for a propeller-driven medium sized airship, also known as blimp. A PID control algorithm working with orientation and positioning sensors along with actuators for thrust, heading and pitch control, constitute the complete system for tri-axial autonomous motion. The system also has a manual mode for full handheld control. The airship has a live data and video link with a base station that is running a Windows based mapping application. The same application can be used to plan and upload the complete mission that the user wants to carry out in the autopilot mode. The airship can be used for various applications such as aerial photography, video, surveillance, payload delivery and advertisement.

Faraan Rashid is a graduate student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KSA. Currently, his focus areas are communications and signal processing. He has worked as a design engineer specializing in prototyping and customized solutions.