During the previous competition, one of the problems that we noticed was that our blimp was not mobile enough to navigate the windy environment inside MESH in Indiana. Therefore, one of our focuses in the past couple of weeks was to mechanically improve our blimp. This includes replacing the motors with BLDC and using an active capturing mechanism to catch the green balloon. There was also an issue with the blimp yawing too much during the forward and backward motion. One of the solutions to that problem was to design with the weight distribution as centralized as possible. Here are the videos of the blimp manually catching the green balloon:

In another video, we can see that the blimp is in a larger space, catching the green balloon:

We can see that in both cases, if the green ball was close enough, it is possible to catch the green balloon under 30 seconds. While we are currently using a relatively slower servo motor, we will be using a faster one in the next run. In terms of using the active capturing mechanism, we can see that instead of trying to go through the goal, our target is to bump into the top-frame of the goal with the net slightly open. This will allow the green balloon to float into the goal due to the momentum:

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