In preparation for our upcoming Preliminary Design Report, we began the process of formalizing the many ideas and concepts we’ve generated, narrowing down the ideas to a couple of promising concepts.

We settled on the primary output for our system being an overlay of the submitted video, providing information: A good compromise between the visually uninteresting but easy option of just values in a table, and the more interesting but complex and computationally intensive option of a full 3d model. Though a basic 3d model, and text based interface are still an option, the first priority will be the video overlay.

We also settled on a preliminary idea for our pipeline. Minimizing the amount of extra hardware to go on the drone, and basing as much as possible to the camera and other hardware already there, this keeps our options open to expanding later if necessary, but not requiring a bunch of resources being put into something that might not be necessary.

We’re beginning to put all this information in our Preliminary Design Report, and preparing for the upcoming presentation to the Verizon team.

After collecting the images of our first tower, we had to start annotating them.

In our first draft of our Preliminary Design Report, we focused largely on background research of pre-exisitng softwares like ours. We found that a direct computer vision approach to this problem is much less common in this industry than a 3D scanning approach. However, the computer vision approach is more promising.

Therefore, we are starting to annotate our cell tower images with bounding boxes and finding the best way to develop our annotating protocol by testing it on open-source computer vision models. The first goal is to find which model is best at drawing bounding boxes on our antennas.

This week we visited one of Verizon’s cell tower sites in Plant City.

We got to see meet our liason engineer and get a full tour of a cellular switch site! Also, Verizon brought out members from their drone piloting team, that helped us collect images of our first cell tower!

This gave us great insight on the necesity of our software project and how it should best be developed to fit into Verizon’s inspection process.

As soon as we got our hands on the drone data we started processing it and it will be passed through our machine learning models very soon.

This week, we were finally able to meet with our liaison engineer, Teja. During this meeting, we were able to explain what information we needed, and though he did not have the answers to all our questions, he is able to look into them on our behalf. We’re glad to now have lines of communication with Verizon, and are eager for our project to get in full swing. Until then, we’re continuing to set the groundwork so that as soon as we have what we need, we know exactly what we need to do.

Our team also participated in the Six Sigma team building workshop hosted by Florida Power & Light. It was a great experience and taught useful lessons on how to approach a problem and craft a solution to best address it. By the end, the process we developed in conjunction with Surgigauge for the workshop came in second place. Overall, the workshop has energized us to work as a team, and is good practice for the types of analysis we’ll need to do throughout our project.

Now that we’ve met each other, the team began building the foundation for our work for the rest of the year. The first step of this was doing a full analysis of our scope of work, identifying our stakeholders, and figuring out our priorities.

Our goal is to create an AI and computer vision system that can take video of cell towers collected by a drone, and estimate the orientation of the antennae to ensure they are properly aligned. As part of this, we need to select the camera that would be on the drone, and create an interface for engineers to upload the data and view the result.

With this established, we were then able to create our logo and team charter. We then made preparations for our upcoming meeting with the liaison engineer from Verizon, preparing what questions to asks, what information we need, and what areas we could use their insight on.

Some members of the team were also able to meet the executive sponsor from Verizon, Abhitabh Kushwaha during the Career Showcase. He was enthusiastic about the project, and the team looks forward to working with him.