September 13, 2024

Drone

A new hardware project creating an autonomous 3D printed drone from scratch that can utilize an AI model to return 3D-topographical maps or to identify/count people.

Alexander Wang, Grace Cavaretta

Drone is a new hardware project that aims to create an autonomous 3D printed drone controlled via a wireless, handheld flight controller. The team's initial priority is to build a rough prototype and achieve dependable process control and navigation. Afterward, the team intends to experiment with full drone autonomy, 3D-topological mapping, or facial recognition. Members will be working with 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software, microcontrollers, embedded programming, telemetry & process control techniques, and ML/AI tools.

Project Goals

  • Create a 3D-printed drone from scratch that can be controlled via a wireless, handheld flight controller
  • Incorporate a 3D-printed chassis with 4 motors, attached to 4 slave microcontrollers connected to a master microcontroller in the middle
  • Implement an artificial intelligence model of some sort onto the master microcontroller
  • Utilize the AI model for an unfinalized autonomous goal, such as returning 3D-topographical maps or identifying/counting people

How do I get involved?

The best way to get involved with Drone is to communicate with the technical leads via Discord or at casual coding. There is no official repository for this project yet, but early documentation is available here.

Technical Leads