Guardian Weapons Systems

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project was to build a tool that would be useful for soldiers on a battlefield or search and rescue by increasing their spatial awareness and situational understanding of their surroundings. Traditionally on a battlefield main form of communications technologies from radios and maps have their limits in conveying information about the environment such as the location of the enemy and friendly forces.

What it does

Guardian our Augmented Reality System combines the ability to do normal day-to-day tasks for soldiers at the same time also giving them the ability to step back and see the bigger picture from the birdseye view of the battlefield when engaged in combat or a rescue effort.

How we built it

There were two parts to this project first were building out the hardware and the second was the software. For our software application, we used the Android Development Studio environment using Java and Kotlin. On the hardware side of things we used an LGV35Q Andriod Phone as our AR platform and also had to build the goggle contraption that holds the AR hardware.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many issues from trying to find proper documentation for the latest drivers and classes to having an inability to properly access our APIs for drones streaming. We also couldn't get access to certain things that we initially wanted such as an Andriod Watch with WearOS development capabilities, and not being able to 3D print our goggles due to the number of resources it would have taken.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely happy to have had an amazing team that was able to work through this project and build out an android application on our own using the capabilities of the devices at our disposal along with the physical build for the AR system. For the majority of the members on our team, this was our first hackathon and first time developing an Andriod Application, learning everything from scratch was a skill curve of its own doing it for the first time.

What we learned

We learned that developing an idea on paper into reality takes a lot of work and dedication. There is a lot of debugging that goes on with building out an application, along with the hardware limits that exist in terms of what it can provide. We all learned how to use Andriod CameraX API along with Kotlin/Java when building out our application by reading the documentation provided by the developers. Overall in every project, we do there are challenges that arrive which need to be tackled.

What's next for Guardian Weapons Systems

Guardian has a far road ahead of itself in terms of creating an even better UI and features for the user by integrating AI/ML object type detection. Using thermal sensors which can provide another novel view. In the future figuring out how to better utilize the drone APIs for accessing the video stream would be amazingly such as swarming for combing video from multiple drones to show a combined map with a larger view. If wanting to shift from more tactical or more utilitarian roles integrating speech recognition for foreign language translation would be another amazing integration for soldiers who tend to be working in foreign nations and a better relay in communication can go a long way.