# The NOVABOT play: a mini airship dedicated to capturing video of an actor on stage

Youssra Mansar, François Bernier, Sylvain Blayac, Louis Dieuzayde, Julien R Serres

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Youssra Mansar, François Bernier, Sylvain Blayac, Louis Dieuzayde, Julien R Serres. The NOVABOT play: a mini airship dedicated to capturing video of an actor on stage. Multidisciplinary Biomechanics Journal, 2025, 50th congress of the.., 10.46298/mbj.16148. [hal-05191700v2](https://hal.science/hal-05191700v2)

HAL Id: hal-05191700

https://hal.science/hal-05191700v2

Submitted on 23 Oct 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# The NOVABOT play: a mini airship dedicated to capturing video of an actor on stage

Youssra Mansarª, b*, François Bernierc, d, Sylvain Blayacc, d, Louis Dieuzaydeb, Julien R Serresª, e

a Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, ISM, Marseille, France

b Aix Marseille Univ, LESA, Aix-en-Provence, France

c Mines Saint-Etienne, Centre CMP, Département FEL, Gardanne, France

d Mines Saint-Etienne, Centre CMP, ID-Fab, Gardanne, France

e Institut Universitaire de France, IUF, Paris, France

* Corresponding author: youssra.man@gmail.com

Received date: 30/03/2025

Accepted date: 27/06/2025

Publication date: 27/10/2025

**Keywords:** actor, human-robot interaction, flying robot, drone, blimp, Novarina

© 2025 The Authors

Licence CC-BY 4.0

Published by Société de Biomécanique

## 1. Introduction

The actor's body is present and active on stage, but capture and projection technology enhances its presence, dramatizing its perception by bringing the spectator's gaze closer to it, fracturing her/his image by taking details of the body or face enlarged on screens, sometimes altered, modified and revealing the visible body beyond her/his normal appearance (Mansar 2022; Mansar et al. 2023). These phenomena create a whole new dramaturgy, emancipated from traditional dramatic action, which begins to combine the real and the virtual in an augmented reality, thus disturbing the spectator's perceptive field. A new poetic space is emerging, focusing on a disquiet at the heart of perceptions and sensations, questioning and giving thought to what it means for a body to be inhabited by a speaking subject. Flying drones are only now appearing on the stage, opening an almost unprecedented field of experimentation and study. Live performance is in the process of forging closer ties with the world of robotics, bringing together very different epistemologies, synergizing know-how and forging partnerships that are often punctuated by artistic achievements. This work has been largely carried out in Japan (Paré 2016), at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) in the Netherlands, and at leading European art schools such as La Manufacture, Haute École des Arts de la Scène, in Lausanne, but to date no notable experiments have been carried out with an actor delivering a text.

## 2. Methods

### 2.1. Choice of the flying platform: an airship

Indoor airships are used in several applications such as arena racing, industrial plant surveillance and forensic airships. Up to now, flying drones used on stage are pre-programmed and lacked autonomy. Consequently, the ability to interact with an actor is limited. This is the crucial innovative research that the Novabot project is pursuing, notably using a small airship on stage interacting with an actor. By miniaturizing the airship's on-board systems, it will be possible to experiment on technological developments in any interior space (a theatre, but also a library, an enclosed archaeological site, underground galleries, etc.), thereby promoting a quality of secure movement in highly constrained locations. An airship in flight is very quiet, able to float without using its propulsion, and safe for the public since it can be flown over (Fig. 1a). The actor can therefore express himself without his voice being masked by the noise of the rotating propellers and can also handle the airship to play with it.

### 2.2. ID-Fly airship design and fabrication

The German company Windreiter UG (https://www.windreiter.com/, reference Elliptical Balloon 2 m) met our requirements in term of payload transportation and flight autonomy. This company designed and fabricated a custom-made envelope for our airship on stage, called ID-Fly (Fig. 1b). The ID-Fly airship measures
2.06 meters in length and 0.82 meter in diameter with an envelope volume of 737 liters (Lift at sea level with the helium gas: 600 grams). This airship envelope was made with the Tritax silver material. At present, the connections are made by simple cables placed along hollow carbon rods and held in place by pieces of unheated heat-shrink tubing. The additional components were a Raspberry Pi Zero W board and its camera, four DC motors (Ref. Yiqigou 4Pcs RC Quadcopter AB Motor Positive and Negative 720 Drone Motor Accessories Suitable for Syma X5 / X5C /M68) and a 3D printed basket (Fig. 1b). Each of these elements was linked with a support to hold it in flying frame, which were made by 3D printing in rigid resin 4000 using a Form 3+ Stereolithography (SLA) FormLabs 3D printer (Formlabs Inc., Somerville, MA, USA). However, these components had been designed to be as light as possible, sometimes to the detriment of strength.

## 2.3. Embedded Electronics on board ID-Fly blimp

The airship was fitted with an embedded computer: a Raspberry Pi Zero W weighing 9 grams, with Debian 10 operating system installed on a 128 GB micro-SD card. The ID-Fly airship was powered by a single cell Lithium Ion 1800mAh 3.7V RS PRO battery, enough for around 20 minutes' use. However, as the Raspberry Pi Zero W consumes 2A at 5V, a Lipo SHIM system was used to boost the supply voltage from 3.7V to 5V. In addition, the Raspberry Pi Zero W board was not designed to drive four DC motors at the same time (Fig. 1b). A custom-made motor shield was therefore designed and manufactured with two L298P drivers, each capable of controlling two motors, with a four-quadrant chopper to enable control in both directions (Fig. 1b). The Raspberry Pi camera's video stream was then transmitted by wifi to a video projector for the audience without storing any video.

An operator remotely controlled all the ID-Fly airship's movements to achieve the desired scenic effect, even if air currents have a major impact on the flight path. Fully robotizing the ID-Fly airship remains a difficult task, given that we only had a payload of 300 grams out of the 600 that can be lifted.

## 3. Results and discussion

The airship generates slow movements and air currents have a major impact on the flight path (including air conditioning) because of its propulsion mode. The

airship buoyancy was adjusted positively by adding weight before each performance to cancel its buoyancy. It can drift and change trajectory more smoothly, offering a more peaceful and contemplative aerial presence (Fig. 1a, see Mansar 2022). Moved both by these environmental variations and by the commands sent by its operator, it establishes a potentially continuous visual link, but one that is always subject to alteration whenever one or more of these parameters change.

In addition, the project's technological interest lies in refining the structure, the methods of movement and the quality of the stage 'presence' of a miniature airship that is in development, and which will be named The Novabot flying robot. The aim is to develop and build

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** (a) The actor (Matteo Duluc) interacting with the airship in flight during a rehearsal at the Antoine Vitez theatre (Aix-en-Provence, France, January 30, 2024). Photo credit: Cyril Sollier. (b) The ID-Fly airship on stage at the Schoolab project feedback day (Gardanne, France, May 22, 2025). Photo credit: Édouard Le.</figcaption></figure>
a small-scale flying machine (total mass less than 100g) that can be flown without any danger to either the public or the actor. Engine noise and energy consumption will be minimized. This will make it more autonomous in flight and enhance interaction with the actor. These mechanical constraints will put it at the cutting edge of current state-of-the-art in mini flying autonomous airships. The new challenge will be to integrate visual tracking of the actor, using the camera's visual flow to track part of the actor's body using algorithms based on artificial intelligence. The aim will therefore be to avoid using a motion capture system as conceived in the US patent by Zhang et al. (2022) but still to be able to track the actor's face as closely as possible (one meter or even less). We found the gondola airship fitted with a camera and able to carry on a 40 grams payload (Gorjup & Liarokapis 2020), such an airship could be relevant for future implementations of the Novabot project on stage.

## 4. Conclusion

This interdisciplinary research will culminate in a public performance, transforming this experimental form into a disseminable work, with a commitment to raising awareness of developments in the artistic field. As a creation in its own right, this innovation also has the potential to address, with the public, contemporary issues relating to our interaction with machines and the creation of images. A reflection on the constant capture of ourselves, as well as on the machine environment and surveillance devices with which we evolve, will raise ethical, aesthetic and political questions that will be explored and analyzed.

## Acknowledgements

La Mission Interdisciplinarité(s) d'Aix Marseille Université (amU), du Théâtre Antoine Vitez à Aix-en-Provence, du Vélo Théâtre à Apt, du Théâtre La Reine Blanche - Scène des Arts et des Sciences à Paris, du Bâtiment Turbulence d'amU à Marseille, de la Plateforme ID-Fab de l'École des Mines de Saint-Étienne à Gardanne, et de la Plateforme scientifique H2C2 (Homme & Humanités, Corpus & Comportements) de la Fédération CRISIS de la Maison de la recherche à Aix-en-Provence.

## Conflict of Interest Statement

None.

## Contributor Roles

JRS and LD: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Validation, Writing original draft; YM: Methodology, Investigation, Software, Data curation, Validation, Writing-review & editing. FB and SB: Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Writing-review & editing.

## Funding

YM was supported by an inter-doctoral school fellowship from Aix Marseille University.

## Data, software, code availability

https://github.com/Flosiccardi/ID-Fly_project
https://github.com/langlath/ID-Fly-Novabot

## References

Mansar, Y. (2022) NovaBot. 15 avril. https://www.youtube.com/@novabot7067

Mansar, Y., Bernier, F., Blayac, S., Serres, J.R., & Dieuzayde, L. (2023). NOVABOT: Acteur et drone. Dialectique du corps en scène et de son image fragmentée. In *Drôles d'objets-Un nouvel art de faire*, 15-17 May 2023, Nancy, France. https://hal.science/hal-04101507/

Paré, Z. (2016). *L'Âge d'or de la robotique japonaise*. Paris, Les Belles Lettres.

Gorjup, G., & Liarokapis, M. (2020). A low-cost, open-source, robotic airship for education and research. *IEEE Access*, *8*, 70713–70721. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2986772

Zhang, F., Tao, Q., Tan, T.J., Cheng, P. S. T., Sungjin, C. H. O., Mishra, V., & Varnell, J. P. (2022). Miniature Autonomous Robotic Blimp. *U.S. Patent No. 11,511,842*. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.