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In my first term as an
Undergraduate Researcher, I worked under Dr. Gerald Cook to build an Unmanned
Aerial System (UAS) which was capable of finding and tracking color blobs from
air using on-board computing capabilities. The high level goal of our project
was to make a simple low cost vehicle which could be used by search and rescue
teams. In the end of the semester I presented my initial results and the UAS
system in the Volgenau School of Engineering Celebration of Research. Following
the same goal, this semester I am working on a bigger project with a team of
senior class engineers to make an UAS that could augment more aspects of a Search
and Rescue mission by autonomously planning near-optimal paths across a search
map, detecting humans in aerial perspective using on-board capabilities and
delivering a rescue package. While in the first term as an Undergraduate
Researcher I learned how to work individually, this semester I am learning how
to be a Project Manager for a team of potential engineers.
This project has
challenged me in many new ways and shown me that my passion is actually a
combination of my research interests towards aerial robotics and my desire to
make an impact in people’s lives. On a weekly basis I meet with my team three
times. In the first meeting we lay down a list of challenges for the week. In
the second meeting we meet with our advisor, Dr. Gerald Cook, to talk about our
progress and in the third meeting we collect data outdoors using our
quadcopter.
We have been collecting pictures with our
quadcopter to work on computer vision algorithms that would better detect
humans in the images. A couple of weeks ago we noticed that we were getting
blurring in the images due the camera stabilizer. As an attempt to solve the
blurring problem, last Sunday, we decreased the shutter speed of the camera and
took more pictures. We collected about 400 pictures and showed the results to
our advisor. Our plan is to decrease the shutter speed even more to see the
effects clearly.
