{"ID":2837576,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19135","arxiv_id":"2511.19135","title":"Autonomous Docking of Multi-Rotor UAVs on Blimps under the Influence of Wind Gusts","abstract":"Multi-rotor UAVs face limited flight time due to battery constraints. Autonomous docking on blimps with onboard battery recharging and data offloading offers a promising solution for extended UAV missions. However, the vulnerability of blimps to wind gusts causes trajectory deviations, requiring precise, obstacle-aware docking strategies. To this end, this work introduces two key novelties: (i) a temporal convolutional network that predicts blimp responses to wind gusts, enabling rapid gust detection and estimation of points where the wind gust effect has subsided; (ii) a model predictive controller (MPC) that leverages these predictions to compute collision-free trajectories for docking, enabled by a novel obstacle avoidance method for close-range manoeuvres near the blimp. Simulation results show our method outperforms a baseline constant-velocity model of the blimp significantly across different scenarios. We further validate the approach in real-world experiments, demonstrating the first autonomous multi-rotor docking control strategy on blimps shown outside simulation. Source code is available here https://github.com/robot-perception-group/multi_rotor_airship_docking.","short_abstract":"Multi-rotor UAVs face limited flight time due to battery constraints. Autonomous docking on blimps with onboard battery recharging and data offloading offers a promising solution for extended UAV missions. However, the vulnerability of blimps to wind gusts causes trajectory deviations, requiring precise, obstacle-aware...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19135","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19135v1","authors":"[\"Pascal Goldschmid\",\"Aamir Ahmad\"]","published":"2025-11-24T13:59:31Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":606703,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2837576,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19135","paper_title":"Autonomous Docking of Multi-Rotor UAVs on Blimps under the Influence of Wind Gusts","repo_url":"https://github.com/robot-perception-group/multi_rotor_airship_docking","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}