A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Robotic Airship
for Education and Research

Miniature indoor robotic airship platforms offer high mobility, safety, and extended flight times. This paper focuses on the feasibility, design, development, and evaluation of such a platform for robotics education and research. Selected commercially available envelope materials were considered and tested in terms of their helium retention capability. The obtained envelope properties were used in a feasibility study, demonstrating that indoor airships are environmentally and financially viable, given an appropriate material choice. The platform's mechanical design was studied in terms of gondola placement and rotor angle positioning, resulting in an unconventional, asymmetric arrangement. The developed system was finally tested in a simple path following experiment for proof-of-concept purposes, proving its efficiency in attaining the desired heading and altitude configuration. The proposed robotic airship platform can be used for a variety of education and research oriented applications and its design is open-source facilitating replication by others.

More details can be found at the following publication:

Gal Gorjup and Minas Liarokapis, "A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Robotic Airship for Education and Research," (under review).

TEAM

Gal Gorjup PhD Student, New Dexterity research group
Department of Mechanical Engineering
The University of Auckland
e-mail: ggor290@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Minas Liarokapis Lecturer / Research advisor of the New Dexterity research group
Department of Mechanical Engineering
The University of Auckland
e-mail: minas.liarokapis@auckland.ac.nz

GITHUB REPOSITORY

A GitHub repository containing all the required CAD files and code.


The Github repository of the open airship can be found at the following URL:
github.com/newdexterity/Airship

BILL OF MATERIALS

The Bill of Materials for the development of the open airship can be found at the following URL:
BOM_OpenAirship

CONTACT

Interested in our research? Contact us!



+64 9-923-6688
m.liarokapis@auckland.ac.nz