Learning landing control of an indoor blimp robot for self-energy recharging

We report on learning landing control for the self-energy recharging of indoor blimp robots. Indoor blimp robots have potential applications in monitoring, surveillance, and entertainment. It might be necessary for blimp robots to fly for a long time to achieve these tasks. Since blimp robots cannot have a heavy battery, it is difficult to fly for long time. Therefore, we solved this problem by developing self-energy recharging control, i.e., docking to an energy charging station. We call it landing control. We introduce a way to learn landing control to tackle an unstable flying condition. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the landing control. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007