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Development of entertainment balloon robot system for an indoor event venue

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

A part of this research was supported by Nihon Stage Co., Ltd. Authors would like to thank Nihon Stage Co., Ltd. for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, North 14, West 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-8628, Japan

    Hiroya Nagata, Stefan Walke, Soichiro Yokoyama, Tomohisa Yamashita, Hiroyuki Iizuka, Masahito Yamamoto & Hidenori Kawamura

  2. Future University Hakodate, Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan

    Keiji Suzuki

Authors
  1. Hiroya Nagata
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  2. Stefan Walke
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  3. Soichiro Yokoyama
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  4. Tomohisa Yamashita
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  5. Hiroyuki Iizuka
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  6. Masahito Yamamoto
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  7. Keiji Suzuki
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  8. Hidenori Kawamura
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hiroya Nagata.

Additional information

This work was presented in part at the 22nd International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Beppu, Oita, January 19-21, 2017.

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Nagata, H., Walke, S., Yokoyama, S. et al. Development of entertainment balloon robot system for an indoor event venue. Artif Life Robotics 23, 192–199 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0419-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0419-5

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