Using Autonomous Drones to Deliver Supplies During COVID-19

Inspiration

The COVID 19 pandemic has affected all of us. Living in one of the epicenters of the outbreak in the US has been eye-opening. When we take a walk outside, we see no one out on the streets, no one playing in parks, no one living their lives. Life at home has been even harder: ordering food is frightening, buying textbooks from online sites to study from takes ages, and the entire online delivery system has collapsed to shambles. People who are sick and in self-quarantine can not even exit their house due to the highly contagious nature of their disease. We decided to make life a little easier on the people, and help end this guarantee as quickly as possible by incentivizing people to stay inside by making it more convenient. We want to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, and a method to aid social distancing, we thought, was the best way to accomplish this.

Goal

Using deep learning and computer vision, we want to train a drone to navigate by itself in crowded city streets. We want our final model to have a high level of accuracy and have no trouble safely detecting and navigating a drone around any obstacles.