The Drimages: Autonomous Target Scoring Drone

The autonomous target scoring drone project description was brought forth by the United States Navy.  The specifications call for a drone that is connected wirelessly to any laptop at some pre-specified base station.  Through some graphical user interface, a user would specify a list of GPS coordinates that would contain physical archery-style targets laid out on the ground.  The drone would then fly autonomously fly to each target and perform image processing on each target.  Each target would have a mark of some kind on it, and the image processing module would produce a score representing how far away the mark is from the center of the target.  All of this information is to be shown on the graphical user interface so the user can see exactly what is happening.

Our group has taken some design liberties with this specification, while still maintaining the core specification of the project.  We have included options that allow the user to fly the drone manually from the laptop in case they decide that a manual override is necessary.  We also have support for live streaming capabilites rather than taking still images and processing them.  Something we are quite proud of is that our drone was built "from scratch," meaning that we did not purchase a pre-built drone that would require hacking into.  We felt that in the long run, this process would not have been fruitful, and much of our time would have been spent trying to hack into the drone's flight controller.