Duckiefloat: a Collision-Tolerant Resource-Constrained Blimp for Long-Term Autonomy in Subterranean Environments
This addresses mobility and endurance issues for search and rescue teams in constrained underground settings, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blimp and algorithm concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of long-term autonomy for search and rescue robots in subterranean environments by proposing an autonomous blimp system, achieving collision-tolerance and low power consumption for operations lasting over an hour.
There are several challenges for search and rescue robots: mobility, perception, autonomy, and communication. Inspired by the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge, we propose an autonomous blimp robot, which has the advantages of low power consumption and collision-tolerance compared to other aerial vehicles like drones. This is important for search and rescue tasks that usually last for one or more hours. However, the underground constrained passages limit the size of blimp envelope and its payload, making the proposed system resource-constrained. Therefore, a careful design consideration is needed to build a blimp system with on-board artifact search and SLAM. In order to reach long-term operation, a failure-aware algorithm with minimal communication to human supervisor to have situational awareness and send control signals to the blimp when needed.