This week, Gatormatix presented their prototype at Prototype Inspect Day (PID)! We as a team received very valuable feedback from all the judges during our presentations. Showing off our drone body as well as the different subsystems of our drone platform was very insightful to not only us but also to the people around us. Our project complexity has made it essential for our multifaceted team to split up into different groups, with software and hardware teams. Although we still very much work together, seeing our project come together was extremely interesting and a good checkup for moving forward.

Most of the criticism received during PID were suggesting on how we should navigate our project. Practically all the judges had expertise in mechanical (or related) field, so most of the feedback received was along those lines. We have a few notable actions we are planning to take moving forward based on feedback. First of all, we were recommended to simplify the project as much as possible and start ordering parts soon. Although our project is very complex, testing subsystems is going to be crucial to understanding how parts work, and ordering parts will be necessary for testing. We are also going to make a CAD model of our prototype, as it will be necessary for SLDR, and it will be good for testing and presenting. The next significant research items will be cameras and LiDAR. We want to find the right type of camera for our use case, and we are under the impression that 2D LiDAR might not be powerful enough to solve our problem. We are all doing extensive research on the topic to gain enough proof.

Great testing has been done for our prototype presentation. A SLAM demonstration was shown at PID which was valuable for judges to understand what exactly it is. A LiDAR sensor was set up with live feedback to its software outlining the box it was in perfectly. A cardboard example of the sensor platform was also created for us to have a better understanding of how we are going to assemble the sensors in order to make our project fly! Overall, great progress has been made, and we look forward to another week of working together!