This week at the UAV lab, the team had their Preliminary Design Review Presentation with community partner professor YangQuan Chen and supervisor Christopher Butler. Students (from left to right) Christopher De La Cruz, Alejandro Sanchez, Nathan Ibarra, & Jeffrey Ng presented the UAV goals and challenges that will be faced this semester. This is an important day for the team since they are now headed into the Phase V of the project.
The platform team discussed the purchasing of a new drone the Phantom 4, and are also parting ways from the drone mapping software, Mission Planner, due to its incompatibility with the new drone. The Phantom 4 drone is a reasonable and efficient upgrade that will give the team a new and easier to work with environment. Current challenges the platform team is facing is the incorporating of the camera module to the Phantom drone. That is because the new drone's documentation on adding additional modules is limited but possible. Therefore the platform team will have to work to understand the new drone's hardware and potentially risk being put behind schedule. Another issue the team is finding is the ability to trigger the camera manually but is working closely with the imaging team to find a solution. As the platform team anxiously awaits for the arrival of the new drone, with all issues aside, they are working to understand and learn all about the new drone and its features.
The imaging team discussed the updates the NDVI software will be going through, everything from updating the readability of the code, to adding new features, and the redesigning of the graphical user interface. The imaging team has been working with the platform team on resolving or finding an alternative to camera triggering. They came up with the solution to remove the first photos taken by the drone until it reaches its appropriate altitude, however, it is inefficient as well as inaccurate. Most importantly, the imaging team is working to make the software compatible with any hardware desired. The reason for this is because the team wants to provide a fully extensive and customizable option when using this agriculture service over others such as AG Parrot.
Overall, the UAV team has a series of challenges to face but is working diligently and hard along with community partner Dr. Chen to be able to resolve these issues and to finally put this project in the books. Let the journey begin and good luck to the UAV team!
