A team of sudents from The School of Information of The University of California have started with open-source UAV coding this semester and are trying to show the public that drones can be useful in daily life too.
The „Drone Lab“, as the students call it, is a group of eight students who have started learning all the intricacies surrounding UAVs and are developing open-source software for them. They are trying to come up with various ways in which drones could help the society as a whole and by accomplishing this goal they intend to improve drones‘ public image, so that the majority of people will not think of militiary weaponry when they hear the word „drone“.
“Drones have a pretty bad reputation, when most people hear the word “drone,” they imagine high-tech killing machines or government surveillance. We’re trying to do something a little different in Drone Lab.”
Dave Lester, a second-year MIMS student
The students use the AR.Drone 2.0 for their experiments, a relatively cheap UAV model manufactured by the Parrot company. You can just unpack it and contorl it with your smartphone straight away, but „Drone Lab“ uses it in a much more complex way, they develop their own software for it, exploring its autonomous, AI-like capabilities. Their coding language of joice is node.js because it is a very lightweight, network based language that has great I/O features, which are imperative for proper UAV usage.
The UAV’s specifications are the following:
Type: Quadricopter
Price: $300
WiFi Range= 50 meters
Cameras: Frontal HD 720p camera + downwards camera
Sensors: Gyroscope, an accelerometer, magnetometer, 2 altimeters
Processor: 1GHz x86
OS: GNU/Linux
Drones have many possible uses that could benefit us, as I have already elaborated upon in this article , and the students are working hard to come up with new ones everyday. They were inspired by TacoCopter, an internet hoax a created by Star Simpson, an MIT graduate, that was supposed to open up people’s minds to the idea of UAV delivery and it worked incredibly well. I wrote an article about it and here it is – TacoCopter, the UAV project that was too good to be true
“There are lots of uses for drones that people may not typically think of when they hear the term.”
Dave Lester
“I’m particularly interested in strapping sensors to it. Maybe you can use it in building science, to gather temperature profiles across a very tall space. Or there’s the potential for pollution monitoring: you can fly around the city and gather pollution data that would otherwise be difficult to collect.”
Elliot Nahman, Lester’s teammate, also a second-year MIMS student.
One of the biggest hurdles this project is trying to tackle is the legal side of UAVs. Privacy is an extremely important thing for the most people, and they are afraid that the introduction of drones into their daily lives might take it from them. The students are studying the legislation which was not constructed with UAVs in mind and they are trying to come up with ways how to use UAVs without endangering privacy.
“Drones are likely to have a profound impact on the future, but right now they exist in a sort of legal gray zone, our current laws were mostly designed for a previous generation’s technology, and it’s not always clear how they apply to technological innovations.
Dave Lester
“As a society, it’s important that we figure out how to deal with flying devices with cameras.”
Associate professor Coye Cheshire, Drone Lab’s faculty sponsor
Students interested in experimenting with UAV technology are extremely important for integrating drones into our society, but I think that with technology this interesting and so much room for innovation, that projects like this will only become more common.
Photo credit MIMS/UC
Příspěvek Students help to find new uses for UAVs in „Drone Lab“. pochází z MENSURO