VIP University of Hawaiʻi Drone Technologies

About In this VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) the team competes in the AUVSI SUAS competition that takes place in Maryland every year. Each year the competition releases updated rules with guidelines each team has to follow for their mission demonstration. For example, in the past the rules included the drone being able to take pictures of the field it’s flying over while finding targets within the image and identifying the target’s shape, color, alphanumeric, alphanumeric color and geolocation all while the drone is flying autonomously.

Since the beginning I joined this project as a freshman and was able to slowly work my way through the ranks. Starting as a regular team member in the Image Processing subsystem which dealed with taking images, classifying them and submitting them through interop. It was extremely challenging at the beginning since I hadn’t taken a lot of major specific classes but the other team members were always extremely helpful and patient with all of my questions. After attending the competition that summer I was nominated to be subsystem lead which meant I was now in charge of delegating tasks, organizing our schedule for the semester and basically being the spokesperson for our subsystem during presentations. Once COVID hit everything felt very stagnant since competitoin was cancelled and we almost had nothing to really work on. During that time I decided to step up and become project manager for the team which deals with keeping the entire teeam on track with our schedules, creating presentation and report outlines for the team and making sure everything is working smoothly and efficiently.

Bigger things are coming Now, finally as a senior, Iʻm doing my senior design project with UHDT. Going into this year’s competition AUVSI SUAS introduced a new rule that says two teams will be completing their mission demonstration at the same time. This means that we need to have some sort of collision avoidance programmed in to prevent us from crashing into the other team or vice versa. Hopefully, we can figure everything out and get it all working before this June.