So here we are the first blog post. Yes a bit late but we will summarize what Rescue Robotics accomplished last quarter, where we are at now, and what the future holds. If you have any interest in joining our project read this post first to get an idea of what we actually do. Last quarter everyone was new to the team, there was a lot of logistics that we figured out and a lot more that still need work. We began the quarter by splitting the group up into sub-teams: Mechanical Build, GPS, Programming, and Public Presentations. After the first week of setting up meeting times and roles within the team we began the construction of our autonomous quad copter. For the next 5 weeks we built, tested, and tried to tune our quadcopter to fly by remote control. During the same 5 weeks the programming team was learning how to hard code the quadcopter to maneuver using code from an Arduino. They figured out how to have the Arduino talk to the quadcopters flight controller, how to read and track objects seen by our camera, as well as switching between autonomous and RC control. The first half of the quarter in particular was full of learning the basics of designing quad copters. We had to investigate the project basics from every angle as none of us had prior experience building quadcopters or for the most part any RC vehicles ever.
The second half of the quarter was much slower on the building aspects. We realized around the end of week 6 that was had a couple slightly faulty parts that were causing our quad-copter to fly unreliably. The team at this point began to switch gears. As the purpose of this project is to use our findings to help high school students participate in an autonomous robotics competition we have quarterly public presentations. With the quad-copter broken we began preparing for the presentation and developing a separate experimental mobile setup that we could use to move forward with programming. The programming team created a handheld system meant to test their code to see if our quad-copter could track and move towards specific predefined objects. The device with a moderate amount of success displayed an output of which direction the quad-copter would be moving via a laptop display. We wrapped up the quarter with our presentation and finally completing and tuning the quad-copter complete with its new parts.
With an entire quarter full of questions to answer ahead of us our team is now working again. As the high school competition takes place near the end of the quarter we have many goals that we need to complete. This quarter we have to fine tune our camera tracking, increase stability of the quad-copter, create different search patterns, decide how we will pick which objects to investigate and in which order, design and build a new larger copter frame as well as many more challenging problems. As always it is going to be a fun quarter but we will need all the help we can get. If anyone is interested at all in getting more information about our project or even potentially joining the team please contact any team member or Professor Harris. We really do need any and every major within engineering so feel free to contact us. We will try to update the blog frequently throughout the quarter but good luck in classes and happy New Year!

Nickolas Zurlinden, Rescue Robotics