Welcome to the homepage of Senior Design Group 19

We'll be spending this year working to create an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

Below is our abstract, the about us has a short bio of each of us,  weekly reports will be added to the weekly reports page as they become available. Proposals has our midterm proposal, and links we found useful will be a list of websites we've come across and found pertinent to our project.

Abstract

The goal of this project is to focus on the steps to build an autonomous aerial vehicle that is capable of an unassisted landing and patrolling a defined area of ground. It could be for the purpose of spotting a person in a restricted area, or to search for and find a target.

We will for sure have some difficulties as we progress in the completion of the project but we have already started to prepare for some of them. We know that the design model will be difficult to produce; also the autopilot program installed into the vehicle will cause us some trouble. The image tracking and identification work similarly will give us some difficulties.

The technical approach to keep the autonomous vehicle in the air would be to make a glider that has a high efficiency brushless motor in it. When flying straight, keeping it flat will be a small amount of tilt sensors, between two and four. When turning, a couple gyroscopes will be identifying when the vehicle tilts because centripetal force will cause the tilt sensors to become inaccurate. The vehicle will also have GPS.

We expect to have an aerial vehicle that can identify targets and patrol a given area using the GPS coordinates given by design day in April.