The Turtles

Not just one drone. Or even two. It's three swarming drones.

We have designed and manufactured some of our most advanced frames and are more than excited to share them during Mission 8. Each frame utilizes our standard array of sensors necessary for autonomous flight: Flight board, companion computer, optical sensor, and laser range finder. With Mission 8 bringing the challenge of building multiple frames, it has allowed us to specialize frames for given tasks and equipping them with the appropriate sensor suite. Internally, our team took a vote on how we were going to denote the multiple frames as well as their tasks. There were several themes and ideas that were given, such as Bees, Turtles, and Smart Assistants. Ultimately, turtles won the popular vote and the team’s Mission 8 aerial vehicles have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) theme.

The current mission proposed by the IARC requires our autonomous aerial robot to guide autonomous ground robots to one side of a playing field by interacting with them physically through touch. Each ground robot is outfitted with bump sensors that, when activated, cause the robot to turn in a certain direction. This means that Sentinel must identify the ground robots, recognize which direction they are travelling, know which direction they need to go, and run a decision making process to decided what it needs to do to the robot in order to get it to go in the correct direction, all autonomously!

Competition Requirements

Fly autonomously in a predefined route
Fly in accordance with voice commands (move forward, move up, etc)
Avoid a static obstacle (human walking)
Fire laser with voice command
Stop moving on voice command (demonstrate the ability to stop over bin)
Send the feed of the aerial vehicle’s camera to a mobile device app
Basic swarming with at least two aerial vehicles.

Back to the hangar.

multirotor@mst.edu

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