I worked on the design and control of Georgia Tech Miniature Autonomous Blimp (GT-MAB) with Dr. Fumin Zhang in GTSR lab at Georgia Tech.

I was in charge of system identification and controller design to control the altitude of the blimp. I figured out a simple linear model for the blimp and then collected large amount of data to identify the parameters of the model and then generate PID gains for the blimp controllers. This was done using the System Identification Toolbox in MATLAB/Simulink. This work helped us win the third position at IEEE Control System Society’s video submission contest.

On-board electronics holder for blimp and Nano blimp.

Later I was involved with the development of a smaller version of the blimp, where I contributed in electronic hardware design & development, software development and design and 3D printing the mechanical parts of the Nano blimp.

For this work, I was awarded the President’s Undergraduate Research Award in Summer 2015 and Spring 2016.

Publications:
[1]   S. Cho, V. Mishra, Q. Tao, P. Varnell, M. King-Smith, A. Muni, W. Smallwood, F. Zhang. Autopilot Design for a Class of Miniature Autonomous Blimps. Conference on Control Technology and Applications, 2017.

[2]   Q. Tao, M. King-Smith, A.D. Muni, V. Mishra, S. Cho, J.P. Varnell, F. Zhang, Control Theory – Autonomous Blimp. 2015 [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/5M-V4GOFNDA.