ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING VIA DRONE

Engaging Citizens in Environmental Monitoring via Gaming

Citizen science is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools for the rapid and low-cost collection of environmental information, filling a long recognized gap in in-situ data. Incentivizing citizens to participate, however, remains a challenge, with gaming being widely recognized as an effective solution to overcome the participation barrier. Building upon well-known gaming mechanics, ga...

Drone-Type Wall-Climbing Robot Platform for Structural Health Monitoring

Though civil structures need constant maintenance and inspection of the structural health condition and safety of the users, the accessibility is getting harder and harder because of their gigantic height and size. To overcome this problem, several approaches for wall-climbing mechanism have been introduced for many decades; however, there is no assured solution yet. One of the reasons why exis...

Autonomous $\$20$ Drone via Pose Estimation Core-sets

In the pose-estimation problem we need to align a set of n markers (points in 3D space) and choose one of their n! permutations, so that the sum of squared corresponding distances to another ordered set of n markers is minimized. We prove that every set has a weighted subset (core-set) of constant size (independent of n), such that computing the optimal orientation of the small core-set would y...

Autonomous Drone

For our senior project we modified a quadcopter so that it can fly autonomously and land whenever a camera detects a red target. The quadcopter uses four infrared sensors to avoid obstacles and an off-board camera to detect targets. Whenever the camera sees a red target, it tells the quadcopter to land. Our project was mostly successful; we were not able to attach the camera to the quadcopter d...

Sensors for Environmental Monitoring