Related papers: Pointing System for the Balloon-Borne Astronomical…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present…
Balloon experiments are an economically feasible method of conducting observations in astronomy that are not possible from the ground. The astronomical payload may include a telescope, a detector, and a pointing/stabilization system.…
We have developed a lightweight low-cost attitude sensor, based on a Raspberry Pi, built with readily available commercial components. It can be used in experiments where weight and power are constrained, such as in high- altitude…
This paper addresses the lack of a general methodology for the controller synthesis of an optical instrument on-board a stratospheric balloon-borne platform, such as a telescope or siderostat, to meet pointing requirements that are becoming…
Balloon-borne astronomy offers an attractive option for experiments that require precise pointing and attitude stabilization, due to a large reduction in the atmospheric interference observed by ground-based systems as well as the low-cost…
An attitude determination system for balloon-borne experiments is presented. The system provides pointing information in azimuth and elevation for instruments flying on stratospheric balloons over Antarctica. In-flight attitude is given by…
Indian Centre for Space Physics is engaged in studying terrestrial and extra-terrestrial high energy phenomena from meteorological balloon borne platforms. A complete payload system with such balloons is at the most about five kilograms of…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transport of a point mass hoisted by two aerial robots. Treating the robots as a leader and a follower, the follower stabilizes the system with respect to the leader using only feedback from…
We present a method for attaining sub-arcsecond pointing stability during sub- orbital balloon flights, as designed for in the High Altitude Lensing Observatory (HALO) concept. The pointing method presented here has the potential to perform…
This project aimed to design, simulate, and implement a two-axis inertially stabilised platform (ISP) for use in astronomical applications. It aimed to approximate the stabilisation of a Meade ETX-90 3.5" compound telescope at low-cost…
This paper addresses the problem of tracking the position of a cable-suspended payload carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle, with a focus on real-world deployment and minimal hardware requirements. In contrast to many existing approaches…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
Air-bearing platforms for simulating the rotational dynamics of satellites require highly precise ground truth systems. Unfortunately, commercial motion capture systems used for this scope are complex and expensive. This paper shows a novel…
We have initiated the High-Altitude Ballooning programme at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, in the year 2011 with the primary purpose of developing and flying low-cost scientific payloads on a balloon-borne platform. The main…
We introduce UFO, a modular aerial robotic platform for transforming a rigid object into a multirotor robot. To achieve this, we develop flight modules, in the form of a control module and propelling modules, that can be affixed to an…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
High altitude balloons (HABs) are typically tracked via GPS data sent via real-time radio-based communication systems such as the Automated Packet Reporting System (APRS). Prefabricated APRS-compatible tracker modules have made it trivial…
A low-cost measurement system using filtering of measurements for two-wheeled balancing robot stabilisation purposes has been addressed in this paper. In particular, a measurement system based on gyroscope, accelerometer, and encoder has…
In this paper, we present an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) landing system based on visual navigation. We design the landmark as a topological pattern in order to enable the UAV to distinguish the landmark from the environment…
We present an open source toolkit of flight-proven electronic devices which can be used to track, terminate and recover high altitude balloon flights and payloads. Comprising a beacon, pyrotechnic and non-pyrotechnic cut-down devices plus…