The goals for this project is to compete in the next International Aerial Robotics Competetion or IARC. This project would require us to design, program, and build the drone from scratch. The main objective of this project is to learn computer vision, PCB (printed circuit board) design, 3D design, embedded systems, Linux, ROS, and machine learning (TBD). To compete all of these requirements would be a challenging task, so we are planning to split it up into phases and hopefully the next group of members would take over.
This phase is to get much information written down and passed down to the new members so they would have the best chance of learning what is going on with all the software implementations. So far we have completed a computer vision tutorial guide on this GitHub Repo and soon implement a small scale of the IARC with 2x ESP32 with ESP-NOW communication method to send the command of the RaspBerry PI 4 with a camera so it would be sending launch and land commands to the PixHawk Flight Controller. The reason why we are using a flight controller is due to the complexity of making one.
We are going to scale up the drone and implement everything we have done on it with the exception of making our own PCB for reduced weight and possible attempt to make a flight controller on it.
Implement everything on to the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, the computer vision and machine learning thus making it fully autonomous and run the IARC7 challanege.