Grab'N'Glide

Grab'N'Glide Logo!
Drone iteration (minus the battery and attachments)
Three grabbing/pickup attachments: Bag attachment on the left, claw attachment centered, and hook attachment featured on the right
Closeup of our beautiful wiring

Inspiration!

Former strangers now teammates united by a passion for drones, innovation, and a dislike of touching grass.

What it does?

Our home-made drone project is capable of retrieving and transporting items for consumers (but without the extra fees of typical delivery👀)! Grab'N'Glide's precise flight is capable of various speeds and altitudes, allowing airborne transportation to any desired location. Furthermore, our interchangeable pickup contraptions, a bag, claw, or hook, allows the drone to grab/hold items with ease. These features are controlled from a laptop for maximum user control.

How we built it:

Frame: This wood based, biodegradable frame was expertly crafted similarly to a kid's art project--lots of popsicle sticks, tape, and hot glue. Albeit the difference being the intentional engineering of the frame's design to ensure support and stability.

Hardware Components: Our drone's hardware was built from 5 main components. An Arduino mega to support the code, N channel MOSFETs to regulate current, brushed DC motors for each arm, an IMU (gyroscope + accelerometer) to track gravity and angular velocity, and a Bluetooth module from the Qualcomm Arduino Due to communicate with our laptop.

Code: We used Arduino IDE (c++ based) and python to create the bulk of our code! Our flight controller was coded via Arduino, working on the principle of taking data like angles + remote input to then spit out speeds for the motors to ensure balance and desired movement. We also wrote python code for configuring the Bluetooth control to our computer.

Challenges we ran into.

Building a drone is not rocket science, more like drone science (aha) which is still difficult. Throughout the manufacturing and configuration process, we ran into issues ranging from trouble interfacing the inertial measurement unit (IMU) for tracking acceleration and angular velocity, to overheating wires (oops). After a painstaking night of hard work and sleeping on the floor of Myhal, we put in hours to troubleshoot mistakes and get creative with our components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of,

A makeathon has integration of hardware and software to build an innovative working device with a team! In the past 24 hours, we are proud to have embodied the values and principles of a makeathon as a team. We chased our ambitious, creative goal with a learning mindset to each technical aspect.

But mainly, we made a 99.9% functional drone in 24 hours!!