Lighter-Than-Air Vehicle Design for Target Scoring in Adversarial Conditions
Caeden Taylor, Or D. Dantsker
Abstract
At the Defend The Republic (DTR) competition, collegiate teams strive to use their autonomous lighter-than-air vehicle (LTA) vehicles (i.e., autonomous blimps) to autonomously capture helium balloons and score them into the opponent’s goals--—effectively Robotic Quidditch. The challenge involves designing and controlling robot vehicles with physical constraints that can operate in challenging environments with limited sensing, actuation, and computation capabilities. This paper will describe the methodologies used by the Indiana University (IU) DTR team to develop their 2 target scoring LTA vehicles used to win the Fall 2023 DTR tournament. Specifically, the paper provides details regarding the DTR competition including background, team structure, tournament rules, and vehicle restrictions. Then analysis of several competing team vehicles are presented. Afterwards, design methodology used to develop the scoring vehicles are presented, followed by detail on the two scoring vehicle designs developed over the course the Fall 2023 semester leading up to the DTR competition. A discussion of system architecture and integration is given. The paper concludes with lessons learned, and planned future work.