drone swarms for pollination

• 

  start screen

• 

  singular drone code

• 

  mountain terrain

Inspiration

This project is inspired by mimicking the process that a swarm of bees uses to pollinate flowers. In the past, I'd built a 2d proof of concept.

What it does

I intend it to be a 3d simulation of a drone collective that uses swarm intelligence algorithms to pollinate flowers. However, the project suffered from too many bugs to be interesting, it is currently a 3d simulation of a singular drone taking off

How I built it

First, I got the epic games launcher. This launcher allows me to access the unreal engine, a powerful 3D graphics engine often used in gaming and simulation. I got a plugin "airsim" developed by Microsoft Research which supports experimentation with autonomous vehicles. I had an implementation outline for my chosen swarm intelligence algorithm, which I was trying to implement in python.

Challenges we ran into

There is restricted access to the new airsim project, therefore I had to use the old one that has been retired by Microsoft. This means that I had to figure out dozens of issues that were caused by using new versions of platforms and package versions for compatibility, which took 6 - 7 hours of time by googling, guessing, and using llms. Eventually, I was able to run the unreal project with drones and the python code for drone takeoff, despite being stuck on a keypress thing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Introduced to coding for unreal engine

What we learned

Finding maintained platforms will save a lot of time! Figure out the moving parts of the project first

What's next for drone swarms for pollination

To find a current and widely used version of autonomous vehicle simulation and implement swarm intelligence search algorithms as well as computer vision.

Built With

• airsim
• python
• unreal-engine