Nothing like a free-form brainstorm to get the cogs of creativity a-turnin’!
So guys, why did you choose this project? What excites you the most about it?
Adam Warren (Engineering, Robotics) – “I feel like the experience I get here will benefit me later on in the Coast Guard. I’ve worked with this stuff before and I’m excited to continue work with drones and sensors.”
Jack O’Neill (Intelligence Analysis) – “I’m eager to look at how we can set up comms in places where it’s hard or ‘impossible.’ I’ve worked at the DOD and I think this project is really going to help me with that work.”
Skylar Southard (Industrial Design) – “I’m fascinated by drones and radio wave communications. I’m really excited to see what design can bring to this project because design can really change how you look at things.”
Caleb Gardner (Writing/Rhetoric) – “UAVs? Augmented Communications? This is all very alien to me and I can’t wait to learn while working on a potentially life-saving solution to a real-world problem.”
Zerubabbel “Z” Tessema (Computer Science, Robotics) – “I’m excited about this class because I’m interested in the innovational opportunity that drones provide. I chose this project because communication systems are vital and this project can potentially connect places that are off the grid.”
In our meeting, we mainly focused two major challenges: battery power and structure. Drawing inspiration from Project Loon, we toyed with the idea of balloons, blimps, and even kites as UAVs. In the end, we opted for something more tangible and available like a quadcopter or a fixed-wing drone. As for battery life, we considered a “swarm” technology alternation between UAVs. In this system, multiple drones would rotate between use and charging so that we could always have a drone in the air. We also threw around the idea of mounting solar tiles on a fixed-wing drone so that we could keep the drone in-air at all times. In our first meeting we managed to feed off one another’s ideas and we all made a commitment to do something special with this project.
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