Getting ready to debut the Minimum Blimp UAV at TED

Tomorrow Jordi and I will give everyone at the TED conference in Monterey the first public preview of the Minimum Blimp UAV. I did the design and Jordi did all the work! Jordi has more detail in his post (apologies for the repetition!), but basically we took a BlubberBot, kept the envelope, two motors and the plastic motor mounts, and threw everything else out. We added IR position sensors, ultrasonic altitude sensors, an Arduino "Lilypad" and a third motor for vertical control. Our autopilot, sensor and thrust package looks like this:

And it works! Here's a video of it circling a ground-based beacon and maintaining altitude. Extending that to full-room autonomy is simply a matter of adding beacons as waypoint markers.

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Comments

Gareth Farrington February 29, 2008 at 8:40am

Good show guys!
Howard Gordon February 29, 2008 at 8:07am

Have fun with the presentation. Just be careful not to overfly Robin Williams or you might get lampooned.
paul hubner February 29, 2008 at 7:27am

Congrats on taking this to TED! Thats a conference that has been on my radar for a few years and as soon as I can get an invite, I'll be there! If only I knew someone who was somehow involved...

It seems I'm surrounded by brilliant minds - Oh so close but so far ;-)

Enjoy the experience,
Paul

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