Droid that Can Autonomously Navigate (D.A.N.)

Inspiration

When people are travelling, they are usually looking at their phone for directions. In the process, the whole journey of getting to a destination is often missed. We want to build a drone that can help people navigate to their end destination without detracting from the experience of journeying through new lands.

What it does

The drone prompts the user for a destination or request for local attractions, and upon the verbal request will guide the user to an end destination

How we built it

We used Google's API to build the brains of the drone; we pull in local data to make recommendation and convert the address of any place and convert them into a GPS location. Then we built drone with a Pixhawk, a 3DR UBlox GPS, compass, and 3DR Radio Set to allow the drone to be controlled using a phone.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the Google API working with our app was very challenging for us, especially since we didn't have much experience with any APIs at all.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to process a user's request, and, based on geographical tags, suggest places for users to go.

What we learned

Team dynamics are very important and are best cultivated by meeting in person. Initially we thought that splitting up and coding individually would be the best tactic to handle the project, but we found out that this is not the best approach. Additionally the need to continuously reach out to our advisor is something we plan on doing next semester. We were stuck on a lot of programming issues that were solved relatively quickly after we reached out to our advisor for help.