This document is a master's thesis from February 13, 2008 on distributed cooperative control of multiple motors for indoor blimp robots. It describes using a distributed control method where each propeller thrust is calculated independently by small neural networks. This approach could improve robustness against partial motor failures compared to central PID control. The genetic algorithm is used to optimize the neural network parameters, and experiments show the distributed control was more effective than central control. The thesis also lists 3 related research publications.

1. 複合情報学専攻 修士論文 (2008 年 2 月 13 日)
小型屋内自律飛行船複数駆動系の
小型屋内自律飛行船複数駆動系の分散協調制御
複雑系工学講座 調和系工学研究室 修士 2 年 西岡良太
A study on cooperative distributed control of multiple motors
for indoor blimp robot
Research Group of Complex Systems Engineering
Laboratory of Harmonious Systems Engineering
MC2 Ryouta Nishioka
Abstract: This paper describes cooperative distributed control of multiple motors for indoor blimp robot.
The difficulty of controlling blimp robots is that the robots are easily disturbed by environmental factors
such as winds and states of batteries and motors. Many studies have been done on a central control like
PID control. However, there is another control method called distributed control where each propeller
thrust is independently calculated by each small network. The method can be expected to have robustness
against partial breakdowns of motors. Moreover, because the breakdown of motors and the influence of
disturbances can be considered as external perturbations for each small controller, it is possible to adapt to
both disturbances. The genetic algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of neural network. The neural
network evolves on the simulator and the evolved network is also tested in the real robot experiments.
Effectiveness in the distributed control was confirmed in comparison with the central control.
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研究業績（査読付き学術論文，国際会議講演論文，国内講演論文等）
研究業績（査読付き学術論文，国際会議講演論文，国内講演論文等）：
1. Ryouta Nishioka, Hidenori Kawamura, Azuma Ohuchi, Toshihiko Takaya, and Hiroyuki Iizuka,
”Cooperative control of multiple neural networks for indoor blimp robot”,
The Thirteenth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics 2008, (2008)
2. Ryouta Nishioka, Hidenori Kawamura, Masahito Yamamoto, Toshihiko Takaya, and Azuma Ohuchi,
”Vision based control for line following blimp robot”,
The Twelfth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics 2007,(2007)
3. 西岡 良太, 川村 秀憲, 山本 雅人, 高谷 敏彦, 大内 東,
”屋内飛行船ロボットのライン追従制御システムの開発”,
ROBMEC 2007 in AKITA, (2007)