About the Project

Summary

In a disaster area, where the environmental conditions are inhospitable, it becomes of utmost importance to provide relief assistance to the victims. But sometimes, the conditions are not favorable for the relief assistants to help the victims. Another aspect while dealing with relief work is to identify and locate victims because in such circumstances, time is of essence.

The project is aimed at developing a swarm of UAVs that are designed to tackle the above mentioned challenge. The goal of this project, for the purpose of the Intel-Cornell Cup 2015 competition, is to develop 2 quadcopters, where one copter will be responsible for reconnaissance and the other copter will be responsible for transportation, and a master node that is responsible for most of the computational work.

Challenge Definition

The biggest challenge we face is in developing a working network of copters that intercommunicate with each other and tackle the problem in hand. These robots should possess a collaborative approach towards problem solving and self- organization. A major aspect of implementing this network is to have continuous communication capabilities. For the purpose of the competition, the master node, which is responsible for computations, should establish and maintain communication channels with the copters.

Another challenging area is processing the visual data from the reconnaissance copter to identify and determine a victim in its surroundings. Self-awareness for navigation and suitable location determination for delivering the package safely should also be taken into account.

Lastly, the system should also be able to plan a safe route for the transportation copter to deliver the package to the victim. This consists of the complex task of analyzing the visual inputs for mapping and path planning. The potential use of the system lies in the high likeliness of a disaster zone being inhospitable for relief work. Implementation of this project in such scenarios will help in saving lives of victims as well as help relief workers avoid dangerous circumstances.

Impact & Outreach

This project can be used to boost the interest in STEM research. We want the middle and high school students to have more exposure to the real-world application of science and engineering developments. We plan to present our work through live demonstrations, videos and articles at outreach events in the hopes of getting students interested in engineering and STEM research.