Senior Design Team 8 • May 2024
Project Overview
Unmanned aerial vehicle are increasingly employed for exploratory missions in outdoor environments. This project is focused on a generalizable and device-agnostic path planning framework that provides a 3dimensional navigation plan based on the pattern of the detected targets and the wind field at the time of flight. The goal is to first develop an exploratory RL-based policy in simulation environment, then train on aerial imagery and finally deploy a quadrotor for anomaly detection in the real world. A custom OpenAI-GYM environment is developed by the SwAPP lab to train an RL agent using stable-baseline-3. A dataset of Near-Inferared (NIR) was created by flying over multiple soccer fields in various days to train the object detector on real-world data. An automated annotation method, Double-clustering, was developed to localize plant anomalies. The goal is to develop a generalizable algorithm to maximize the number of detected objects within a single battery life of a drone. The project is a combination of research amongst RL and DL frameworks and a study of state-of-the-art tools for robust performance of a quadrotor in real-world.
492 Midterm Project Video
492 Final Demo Video
Final Report
Final Poster
Final Presentation Slides
Team Members
Cody Draper
Software Engineer
My name is Cody Draper, I'm majoring in Software Engineering at Iowa State University with a minor in Cyber Security. My academic interests are in Android Development, Embedded Systems, and Game Design. When I am not doing school work, I am tinkering with my car and motorcycle or playing various video games.
Andrew Sailer
Programmer
My name is Andrew Sailer, I'm majoring in Electrical Engineering at Iowa State University with minors in Computer Science and Economics. My academic interests are in Controls & Automation as well as Machine Learning. When I'm not doing school work you can find me playing trumpet in the Iowa State Marching Band or Men's Basketball Pep Band.
Jesse Gillingham
Artificial Intelligence Research
My name is Jesse Gillingham, I'm majoring in Electrical Engineering at Iowa State University. My academic interests are Embedded Systems, Mathematics, Philosophy, Physics, and Computer Science. When I'm not doing school work I am working on my personal projects, reading books, or learning something new.
Akash Setti
Artificial Intelligence Research
My name is Akash Setti, I am double majoring in Software Engineering and Data Science at Iowa State University. My academic interests are in Artificial Intelligence as well as Machine Learning. In my free time I love to spend time with my friends and family. I am also a big football and basketball fan.
Weekly Reports
Report 1Report 2
Report 3
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Report 9
Design Document
Midterm Design DocumentFinal Design Document