This week, Gatormatix had our official PDR presentation with our sponsoring engineers. It went very well, and our liaisons provided valuable feedback and gave extra direction on aspects of the project like how our drone should communicate with ground control and emphasized a focus on solid data collection over extensive processing. We will be sure to incorporate this feedback so that our final product will be as successful as possible.

We’ve also made rapid progress on various aspects of our preliminary prototype. Thanks to one of our member’s connection with a drone lab on campus, we’ve been able to borrow a hexacopter drone frame which we can use to verify our initial design assumptions and familiarize ourselves with the process of drone construction. We also received a RPLiDAR sensor, which we’ve been able to interface and collect data from. Finally, we’ve verified the successful function of a popular SLAM algorithm, ORB-SLAM3, on a Jetson Orin Nano with an example dataset. As we plan to use this for our flight computer to control drone mapping and navigation, this is a promising development towards real time mapping and navigation. Now that our PDR is complete, we are pivoting to focus fully on prototyping and the verification of individual sensors ahead of final integration.