Turbine Design and Reliability
Development of an Aero-Amphibious Measurement/Inspection Drone
Led by
Bing Ouyang, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus:Harbor Branch
Affiliated Department: Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute
PROJECT
Technical Overview
Mathai (Evan) Karanja worked this summer with Dr. Bing Ouyang and others within the HAUCS project to build and develop an autonomous aerial platform for remote sensing and monitoring, with specific applications in the rapidly expanding business of aquaculture and open ocean environment monitoring. The primary goals of the project for the summer centered around the setup of a basic software framework to allow for development and testing of autonomous programs and then to demonstrate the functionality and effectiveness of the framework. Mathai analyzed a series of different code distributions and API systems and converged on a final combination of the two that allowed for a user to avoid having to program low level control code and simply focus on developing a higher level programs dealing only with in flight event timing and basic control commands. The program was successfully tested towards the end of the program, and the drone was able to fly in a pre-planned flight path in full autonomy, save for takeoff. With this software framework basis in place, future plans of the team include sensor implementation and the development of new and more efficient platforms, such as VTOL (Vertical Takeoff/Land) and ornithopter (flapping wing flight) based platforms.
