Foray: Manual and Autonomous Blimp

Objective

FORAY is a project at UCLA LEMUR, a research lab, that involves the programming and manufacturing of Lighter-than-Air (LTA) robots like blimp. The goal of this project, in collaboration with the government, is to discover the most efficient way to control and to solve pragmatic problems involving these LTAs by placing LTA robots in a competition where they would catch green balls and shoot them to a goal.

Role

• Researched effective ways and created algorithms to make the LTA robot hover in front of a green ball with the use of vision processing and PID control.
• Programmed the LTA robots be controlled through manual and autonomous control with the help of PyGame.
• Found the best camera that enables the blimp to hover in front of the green ball efficiently (cameras used include OpenMV, ESP32 cam, and Nicla Vision).
• Performed unit tests for the whole LTA robot system.
• Created the project’s modularized source code version for easy debugging.
• Prototyped many iterations of mechanical parts using Solid works to design, 3D prints to assemble mechanisms for an autonomous blimp.
• In charge of wiring and soldering hardware components.

Pictures