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Up Close with Autonomous Drone Work

Watch this video to see Steve Willits show off some recent autonomous drone work being done at the AirLab at CMU's Robotics Institute. Willits, Lead Scientist, has had a specialized career in Aircraft and Undersea vehicle design, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, propulsion, and vehicle stability and control.

“What we do at the AirLab is develop state-of-the-art methods for drone autonomy applications, including software, sensors and hardware. The GoAERO Challenge gives us the opportunity to take this to the next level and build larger scale, more capable drones for search and rescue,” said Steve Willits  , a project scientist at RI and team lead of Tartan Air Rescue. “We’re very excited to have won the Stage 1 award for GoAERO and to also receive a NASA grant to get us started.”

Topics:
Autonomy Motion Control Motors & Drives Unmanned Air Vehicles/Systems (UAV/UAS)

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] we know that a lot of organizations and services use drones for search and rescue one of the things that we do here at the airlab is try to develop and perfect the autonomy software for these drone systems and that requires the use of a lot of sensors what you're seeing here are some samples of drones that we have built designed and tested over the

    00:00:31 past five or six years these are all for different programs but they all kind of have one purpose in mind to go out seek a target find an object locate that and then be able to transmit that information back to a rescue team our initial beginning with search and rescue began in looking at Wildfire events focusing on being able to use both cameras um uh and thermal sensors in

    00:01:02 order to map out an area in a dense forest environment while there's smoke and fire going on the Wildfire drones also use fisheye cameras stere THM cameras and liar this is to make sure that we have a complete map and situational awareness of the environment perhaps one of our more famous drones is the one that was used in the Subterranean challenge you

    00:01:28 can see that this is a high highly customized drone system forward and upward and downward looking cameras lots of strobe lights for getting into underground environments and being able to operate in complete darkness and then a capable liar system our most recent drone an Ascent Aros Spirit drone as the base platform to test new platforms for data collection

    00:01:56 on the bottom of the spirit drone you can see that there is a stereo vision camera with a RAR system on it as well as on the top a custom camera system [Music]