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January 31, 2007
the mysterious third guy
I'm Sam, the other member of the blimpbots team. I'm a second-year grad student in AI, studying nothing to do with blimps, but I'm working with Jeff on the technical side. I've been out of commission for most of January due to some other commitments, but now I'm full speed ahead on the project.
The completed blimpbot control board 1.0 is up and running, courtesy of Jeff (see the picture here, or Jeff's video below). There are a few details to change in a second revision, but it does what we need. We have arbitrary motor control over bluetooth, which is pretty awesome. The next step is to demonstrate a simple control loop-- we're going to set up one blimp and control it enough to stay at a set altitude. That involves getting a decent start on the control software and camera tracking, at least for the vertical dimension. So there's a bit of software to write, but stay tuned for our first demo.
Posted by swinterm at January 31, 2007 10:53 AM