Toy blimps are commonly sold at toy shops in the UK at an affordable price and aimed at children. They come with a helium filled balloon, a gondola with 3 fans and a remote control similar to that of a remote controlled car. While a remote control for a car logically maps onto its two degrees of freedom, forwards and yaw the remote for the blimp does not logically map onto its 3 degrees of freedom, forwards, yaw and vertical.
The project tackled was to create an intuitive interface for a remote controlled blimp. The interface chosen for the control was the user's arm. The position of the hand in 3D space was used to interpret the direction of travel which user desired. This information was then relayed wirelessly to the blimp to set the motor speeds accordingly. The position of the user's hand was captured using 3 Orient devices attached to their arm and relayed to a PC based control system.
The system is capable of being controlled either by the user's arm or using a computer based GUI with the mouse. The control system supports user profiles so that individual users can calibrate the system to take account of the length and reach of their arm. The control system interprets the commands and converts them to 3 motor speeds which are transmitted to the blimp using two Prospecks devices. The circuitry in the gondola is then used to set the motor speeds.
The system was tested successfully under both arm control and using the mouse. The blimp was slow to respond to user commands due to its momentum but the fan speeds were shown to change as instructed immediately. It was clear that the arm control was considerably more intuitive than either the GUI or the stock remote control; in particular the stock remote control only provided digital control of the fans while our system was able to vary the speeds of all the fans.