PUB: A Plasma-Propelled Ultra-Quiet Blimp with Two-DOF Vector Thrusting

In 2024, the "low-altitude economy" was written into China's Government Work Report for the first time [1], and flying robots have been rapidly popularized nationwide. From an environmental perspective, electrically powered air vehicles are attracting growing attention; key technologies include overall configuration design, integrated energy management, and high-efficiency, high power-to-weight electric propulsion [2]. For electric propulsion, mainstream systems use electric motors to drive propellers, but propeller noise is significant and hard to mitigate [3], which limits widespread use in cities--the main arena for the low-altitude economy--and is also unfavorable for silent reconnaissance. Hence, there is a pressing need for a new propulsion approach enabling quiet, fully electric flight. In the 1920s, Brown observed that an asymmetric capacitor under high voltage can generate thrust, known as the Biefeld-Brown effect. A leading explanation is ionic wind: a high electric field ionizes air, and the resulting ions accelerate and transfer momentum to neutral molecules, producing a net airflow (thrust) [4]. Xu et al. first mounted a plasma thruster on a fixed-wing UAV without other propulsion; the gliding distance with the thruster on was five times that with it off, but the maximum range was only 45m and no controller design was provided [5]. Zhang et al. realized altitude control for a micro ionic-wind-powered UA V using passive components, but the wingspan was at most 6 .3cm