Autonomous Docking of Multi-Rotor UAVs on Blimps under the Influence of Wind Gusts
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arXiv
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| Hauptverfasser: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866912726719135744 |
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| author | Goldschmid, Pascal Ahmad, Aamir |
| author_facet | Goldschmid, Pascal Ahmad, Aamir |
| contents | Multi-rotor UAVs face limited flight time due to battery constraints. Autonomous docking on blimps with onboard battery recharging and data offloading offers a promising solution for extended UAV missions. However, the vulnerability of blimps to wind gusts causes trajectory deviations, requiring precise, obstacle-aware docking strategies. To this end, this work introduces two key novelties: (i) a temporal convolutional network that predicts blimp responses to wind gusts, enabling rapid gust detection and estimation of points where the wind gust effect has subsided; (ii) a model predictive controller (MPC) that leverages these predictions to compute collision-free trajectories for docking, enabled by a novel obstacle avoidance method for close-range manoeuvres near the blimp. Simulation results show our method outperforms a baseline constant-velocity model of the blimp significantly across different scenarios. We further validate the approach in real-world experiments, demonstrating the first autonomous multi-rotor docking control strategy on blimps shown outside simulation. Source code is available here https://github.com/robot-perception-group/multi_rotor_airship_docking. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19135 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Autonomous Docking of Multi-Rotor UAVs on Blimps under the Influence of Wind Gusts Goldschmid, Pascal Ahmad, Aamir Robotics Multi-rotor UAVs face limited flight time due to battery constraints. Autonomous docking on blimps with onboard battery recharging and data offloading offers a promising solution for extended UAV missions. However, the vulnerability of blimps to wind gusts causes trajectory deviations, requiring precise, obstacle-aware docking strategies. To this end, this work introduces two key novelties: (i) a temporal convolutional network that predicts blimp responses to wind gusts, enabling rapid gust detection and estimation of points where the wind gust effect has subsided; (ii) a model predictive controller (MPC) that leverages these predictions to compute collision-free trajectories for docking, enabled by a novel obstacle avoidance method for close-range manoeuvres near the blimp. Simulation results show our method outperforms a baseline constant-velocity model of the blimp significantly across different scenarios. We further validate the approach in real-world experiments, demonstrating the first autonomous multi-rotor docking control strategy on blimps shown outside simulation. Source code is available here https://github.com/robot-perception-group/multi_rotor_airship_docking. |
| title | Autonomous Docking of Multi-Rotor UAVs on Blimps under the Influence of Wind Gusts |
| topic | Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19135 |