IARC 2018-2019
The International Arial Robotics Competition, or IARC, is a competition designed to advance the state of the art of arial robotics, or drones. From 2018-2019, we developed a series of 4 Autonmous Swarm drones which interacted with humans via voice commands, which demonstrated full autonomy capabilities at the 2019 IARC competition (check out our paper for more information on what we did!). I primarily dealt with managing the team, but also contributed technically to the perception pipeline, mechanical design and electrical design.
EStop and Ultrasonic Autonomy Board
We for the most part used stock Bebop 2 Drones, but in order to add autonomous capabilities and more safety to work around humans safely, we built an EStop to and ultrasonic array. The EStop and Ultrasonic Autonomy Board switches roughly 40 A of current, using a standard RF controller as the activation. It converts RF TTL to logic level in order to control three power mosfets. The board also contains an ESP8266 which relays the values from three ultrasonic transceivers to our base computer over WiFi.
EStop Demonstration
All four drones assembled and ready for competition!
IARC 2017-2018
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From 2017-2018, we built an autonomous drone designed to land on top of modified Roombas in order to herd groups of them to two goals. We demonstrated autonomous flight as well as the ability to redirect Roombas by interacting with their touch bumper.
I helped lead a team of students to develop this drone over a period of a year, designed the mechanical roomba-landing system, developed roomba targeting strategies and helped build a competition simulator to test our algorithms on.
