Achieving and Maintaining Inverted Pose for Miniature Autonomous Blimps

Miniature autonomous blimps (MABs) have advantages of safe flight and long flight duration. This paper presents a flight controller design for an underactuated MAB to achieve and maintain the inverted pose. When the MAB starts from a bottom-heavy pose, an energy-shaping controller is engaged to achieve a swing-up motion for the MAB to reach the proximity of the inverted pose. Once the criteria for controller switching are met, a stabilizing controller is employed to maintain the inverted pose. The performance of the proposed controller is verified through the experimental results collected from the GT-MAB.