Development of entertainment balloon robot system for an indoor event venue

This project revolves around the combination of different state-of-the-art concepts to create balloon robots which can be used for entertainment purposes. The goal is having multiple robots perform a choreographed flight on preset paths to make use of the “dead space” over the crowd of an event, either as part of the show or displaying information and advertisements. As the balloon is flying on a defined trajectory, a tracking system for its position is needed. For this purpose, several infrared cameras monitor the position of a marker attached to the balloon. The main challenge is overcoming the instabilities of the system to ensure a smooth and precise flight, resulting from the balloons structure: the balloon is filled with helium to counteract the forces of gravity and, therefore, minimize the work needed to keep its momentum. Finding a way to achieve this optimization and the precision mentioned beforehand is the task that we will present and solve in this paper.