Future Work
Our Goals for the Future
While the current firmware and software preforms all the intended functions there are many possible extensions that will allow for more granular control of our blimp as well and provide more information regarding the state and surroundings of the blimp. Included in this work would be such things as a more intuitive GUI that would allow for control of directionality (versus control of individual motors), a reliable protocol to deal with the significant packet loss we encountered during experimentation, and better parallelization within the blimp controller.
Within the blimp controller the primary area of focus is the control loop that manages almost all details of operation. The controller processes received packets, runs the PID controller (when enabled), and sends back sensor readings to the base station. Unfortunately, at the current time all sensor readings are blocking (i.e. we query the sensors, process the results, and send it back all at once). By blocking we are preventing the blimp from preforming other important operations such as altitude lock and further message process. Given additional time, it would be very beneficial to implement a basic OS that allowed for the fair scheduling of all tasks so as to not significantly delay any single task.