This week, Gatormatix met and determined an improved plan for developing our sensing system. Our original vision was a little hazy and involved working on the sensing, mapping, and drone hardware one after the other, but upon reconsidering the needs of our sponsors, we have decided to focus our development around two parallel and independently-functional paths:
Developing the drone hardware itself and creating a handheld “rig” that will allow for fine tuning our sensor setup and mapping pipeline without needing to wait for the drone itself to be functional. Similarly, the drone prototype will be constructed with weight ranges in mind for the sensing components but will not have to wait for the rig to be completed.

By dividing the work along these boundaries, we hope to enable more rapid development and let our team members work within their specializations – our mechanical and aerospace engineers can focus on making sure the drone can easily fly and maneuver, the electrical and computer engineers can focus on interfacing the various components, and our computer scientists can select and refine our sensing algorithms. In this way, we hope to rapidly improve on our design and manage the complexity of integrating a project of this nature. We have updated our PDR to reflect this new approach and will present it for sponsor approval within the coming week.