Six Rice electrical and computer engineering students have developed the hardware and software necessary to coordinate sensor-carrying drones that can evaluate local atmospheric conditions, measure electronic signals such as Wi-Fi, map areas in three dimensions and more.
The team calls itself Skynet — yes, they’re aware of “The Terminator” — and spent weeks building and testing drones customized to carry sensors, and then writing the massive amount of code to run them. They are most proud of their APIs, or application programming interfaces, which will let users customize the drones to meet their own sensing requirements.
“The system is designed to be application-agnostic in the sense that you can use our APIs and libraries to build any kind of autonomous solution that you want,” said team member Kevin Lin. “Based on what we’ve seen at the Olympics and other presentational shows, you could totally use our software to build something like that.”
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
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