Abstract
The final goal of this study is to achieve an autonomous indoor blimp robot. While blimp robots are attractive entities moving safely in three dimensional space, they are hard to control autonomously as they are subjected to strong inertial forces and air resistance, and have many nonlinear characteristics. As blimp robots are used not only in vast halls but also in complex buildings with obstacles such as pillars and walls, they need to plan suitable motion for avoiding them. Furthermore, robots need to conserve energy with restricted power supply because they are unable to carry heavy batteries. We have to design an action-value function for planning motion in a blimp robot, considering constraints imposed by these characteristics of an actual robot. In this paper, we designed an action-value function for motion planning based on the potential field method, and evaluated its effectiveness in a simulated environment.
