This week, the team has mostly finished their drone platform. There are still small modifications that need to be made in order to complete their design, but the majority of the key parts are complete. This is great news for the team, as the final design review is coming up in the next 2 weeks. This week, the team is preparing for the FDR by completing all four of their product manuals, their product video, poster, and the presentation. The peer review presentation will come this Tuesday, where the team will gain very valuable feedback from other groups in order to be ready for the final presentation. There is one week between now and the last day of school, so we are going to push hard and polish up our work to have the best presentation we possibly can! Look forward to seeing all of you!

This week, the team is making their final push to get their deliverables turned in, in preparation for the final design review just 3 weeks from now. These deliverables include the multi-volume documentation describing the entire project and how it works, the project video, and the project poster. The project video is a short overview of the project and gives a clear idea of what our goals are, and the project poster highlights some of our successes and designs.

Before completing the final design review, we as a team are going to spend time preparing the presentation. This will ensure that we will be well-prepared for any complex questions we receive at the final design review. We will make the last push on finishing any software and hardware deliverables before we swing our full attention on the documents. We look forward to seeing you at the final review!

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.

Most of the criticism received during PID were about how we were presenting our usage of simulation versus real flight testing. Based on this, we understand that we need to be very explicit about what we are using the simulations for. Primarily, we are doing simulation to try to test navigation, which is something that is challenging to do in real life currently. We are not testing whether the drone will fly or not, which we decided to just test in real life since we are limited on time.

Great testing has been done for our prototype presentation. A simulation was showcased on Gazebo, which is the tool that we are using to test this navigation. In addition, the completed drone was shown along with videos of flight, which is very good progress.

This week the team continued their work with attempting to strengthen the drone platform after some of the damage experienced from the previous flight tests. Nothing critical was damaged, except for the drone body, but the team is working on ensuring that the next flights can occur so that they can test their technical performance measures before the final design review.

In addition, they worked hard on the sensor platform, working to calibrate the LiDAR and Camera sensors to get an image. This was a success, and soon collection of real-world images will start to take place. We look forward to getting this thing going!

The team was able to complete their first flight test, where they learned very valuable things about the operation of the drone. Firstly, they got a gauge for how to control it with the manual controller — how sensitive the drone is to motion, how to land the drone safely, and more. In addition, they were able to observe how the drone fared after sustaining some damages. We found that minor issues, such as tipping over at the end, are fine and no significant damage will be sustained. However, there was one instance where the drone did not turn off despite us turning down the throttle. This led us to discover additional settings which would let us kill the drone in case of any issues, which will certainly be used in future flights if something goes wrong.

This week, the team presented to the second qualification review board. The feedback was very important, as the board indicated that our project is very unlikely to be finished in the timeline we have given due to the complexity of systems integration. It is now critical that the team dedicates more time to the project to ensure that everything can be completed.

On another note, the final parts for drone construction have arrived after long delays, which now allows the team to prepare for their first flight test in the Malachowsky drone laboratory. This is scheduled to happen this coming weekend, so stay posted to see our results!

This week, the team was able to finish up most of the drone construction, along with getting their flight controller connected to the antennas we will use for communicating with the drone. There are still some missing components that were supposed to arrive this week for our drone test planned on Thursday. This is a setback for the team, since we wanted to showcase our drone working before presenting to the second QRB. However, it is what it is, and the team will recoup and hopefully get all of the components they need to finish drone construction for their first flight test. Stay tuned for next week!

The team has finally completed the drone platform, with all critical components connected. This leads the team to prepare for their first test in the Malachowsky Drone lab. This is critical to staying on track with the project, since there are benchmarks to getting to full autonomous flight. There are also multiple steps to getting the LiDAR sensor module working in tandem with the platform while flying, which is an important step we need to take. However, we are trying to ensure that each step forward works full to ensure we do not need to go backwards if things go wrong.

The team has made significant progress on gathering data via the LiDAR component we will strap to our drone. The picture above shows a still image of a scan that was collected of Library West, and then mapped to software using a SLAM algorithm that uses LiDAR data only. This is very significant as the proof-of-concept exists and the next steps are to simply get the software running on the target platform we expect to use. The team expects to begin the handheld testing of their drone platform soon before getting the software platform integrated with the drone.