Narcotic Network

Background

There is a need for a fast, easy, and accurate form of short distance medicine delivery. Existing one-day delivery services like FedEx, UPS, and Amazon exist, but these services can have unreliable tracking. In-person pickup options are time consuming and may not be accessible to the terminally ill and elderly. These users will benefit most from a lightweight medical delivery drone that makes timely routine deliveries of prescription medication in suburban areas.

Goal and Objectives

The goal of this project is to design, manufacture, and fly an autonomous drone. The final drone will transport a medical payload of at most 0.5 kg a minimum distance of 0.5 km. It will use a GPS to navigate from a designated medicine pickup point to a drop-off location.

The objectives for the Fall Quarter are listed below:

• 12/13/2025: Finish designing, manufacturing, assembling, and verifying propulsion components.
• 12/13/2025: Finish designing, manufacturing, and assembling structural components. 
• 12/13/2025: Finish designing and modeling a payload mechanism. 
• 12/13/2025: Fly the quadcopter manually without a payload.

The objectives for Spring Quarter are listed below: 

• 1/15/2026: Finish manufacturing a prototype of the payload mechanism. 
• 1/31/2026: Finish testing and validating payload prototype 1.
• 2/21/2026: Finish autonomous quadcopter prototype 1.

Payload Mechanism 

Our goal is to distribute medicine without the need for user interaction which consists of an autonomous drone with a built in payload mechanism. The mechanism we designed will allow the pharmacist or the distributor to place the medicine inside the storage compartment through the front of the drone where it will be stored. The medicine will then be released through the bottom where we have a sliding door connected to a linear actuator that extends to open the door and release the medicine and contracts or is at rest for transportation. The overall dimensions of our storage/ payload mechanism is 8” x 8” x 4” which is enough space to transport several medicines or small packages.

Software

Autonomous navigation will be performed using ArduPilot, an autopilot system used to set parameters for routes, hardware, and simulations. In addition, our team will be using a mission planner, a ground control station, to monitor and configure thrust capacity, altitude, speed, battery usage, distance, etc throughout the quadcopter flight.

Team Contact(s)

Jenna Lee jungal2@uci.edu
Vincent Nguyen hoanghn5@uci.edu
Gisselle Sanchez gisses2@uci.edu
Arianna Alonso arianna4@uci.edu

Sponsor/Advisor

Barozh Smail bsmail@uci.edu