Skittles, The Robotic Blimp

posted Oct 16th 2009 8:00am by James Munns
filed under: robots hacks

Blimp 4_0

Funky Shiitake Mushrooms, a high school design team from Fremont, CA, have created a low cost airship they call Skittles the Second. Skittles is a remote control robotic blimp, complete with 4 reversible propellers, wireless video, and 2.4 a GHz remote control. Somewhere between a regular RC blimp and a Predator Drone, Skittles and FSM have managed to gain a large number of awards including winning the Digital Open grand prize. The ship performs amazingly, and can perform a full 360 in just over one second. There is a video after the break.

For the future, the group plans to give the ship autonomous capabilities, in order to avoid losing another drone in strong wind. Fortunately, after that happened to Skittles the first, they were able to hunt it down after it had floated 3 miles down the road. Since they are all high school students under 17, we would say they have a lot of potential. I, for one, welcome our new robotic blimp overlords.

Comments [18]

tagged: high school, robot, blimp, skittle, airship

Reader Comments

Will a little boy pretend to climb inside so we can half round the clock news coverage of this thing?

Posted at 8:17 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by chiefcrash

Correction, will the little boys brother say that he saw the little boy climb into it?

Posted at 8:19 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Just dance

The summary says the lost blimp was found 3 miles away, but in the video, they say 3 HOURS away.

Posted at 8:35 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Steve

It is possible it took them 3 hours to search the 3 miles depending on the terrain…

Posted at 8:51 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Chris

Oh, how timely.
And add a GPS locator with UHF transmitter too (Raveon tech, et al), guys.

Posted at 9:01 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Pocket

Speaking of Overlords… Zerg Halloween prop anyone?

Posted at 9:30 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Plloi

There;s a little kid in there! no wait

HONEST! no wait

Posted at 9:50 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by strider_mt2k

An aircraft with a 2.4ghz remote control freq.? Isn’t that just asking for trouble?

Posted at 9:51 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by samurai

Well done, I remember doing the same thing back in uni: http://www.mm04.net/projects/degree/eyeship/

@Pocket – GPS + UHF = more weight = we need a bigger balloon!

Posted at 10:21 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by Tim

as it turns out, skittles was the one who really hijacked that balloon yesterday, not the little boy! he wanted to upgrade to shiny Mylar…

Posted at 11:19 am on Oct 16th, 2009 by reb00t

lol strider beat me to it

Posted at 12:54 pm on Oct 16th, 2009 by wdfowty

@Tim – Make it bigger! It should be able to hoist an instruments package; this could be part of the load. And the unit I worked with is 6 oz. not including battery and antenna.

Posted at 1:24 pm on Oct 16th, 2009 by PocketBrain

Hmmph .. and we managed to make a robotic blimp in less than a day at Defcon … out of three badges, some motors, and it even was autonomous.

Pfft.

Posted at 3:22 pm on Oct 16th, 2009 by Martin B

TOO SOON!!! Falcon did non die in vain!

Posted at 5:24 pm on Oct 16th, 2009 by sol

@samurai

Currently the most popular types of radios for rc aircraft are on 2.4 ghz because they do not interfere with each other.

Posted at 6:27 pm on Oct 16th, 2009 by RazorConcepts

Okay, seriously.
So — I guess I’ll be the gorilla in the room and say I’m the only one in the room who hasn’t not noticed these look like 2 giant floating testicles…

Posted at 9:04 pm on Oct 17th, 2009 by Ummmm...

@RazorConcepts

maybe. i dont know much about RC standards, but it seems like with so much running at 2.4ghz (cordless house phones, wifi, etc.) that there’d be a tremendous amount of noise at that frequency?

Posted at 9:12 pm on Oct 17th, 2009 by samurai1200

http://Www.Plantraco.com blimps are better.

Posted at 11:33 am on Oct 19th, 2009 by Kev