If you didn’t know this already, one of my pet ideas is “Peeping Blimp“. Thus, I was happy to see at robots.net that NASA is developing an autonomous airship.
According to a Nature.com article, Alberto Elfes and a NASA team have developed an 11 meter long autonomous airship called Aerobot.
Aerobot is smart enough to correct its course in wind. It can also assess the danger of air turbulence with its wind sensors and move to a safe altitude if needed. It uses GPS signals to track its location.
Key statement from the NASA site about the automated reasoning:
The onboard autonomy architecture has to integrate perception-based inferences about the environment of operation of the vehicle, vehicle health monitoring and reflexive safing actions, accurate flight control, and long-range mission planning and monitoring.
NASA sees it as a potential tool for planetary exploration since survey by robot airship would be able to cover greater distances than a ground rover and provide better images than an orbiting platform.
For more details, see the Aerobot page.
