Unmanned Aerial Systems

Design and development of UAS for use in agriculture and healthcare

A. Drones in Agriculture

In 2022, I obtained the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to work on the development of agricultural drones. I collaborated with Dr. Dharmendra Saraswat, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Specifically, I worked on developing a simulation platform to test code for a system of co-ordinated drones and ground robots for use in detecting weeds in crops. I presented this work at the Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium.

B. Medical Delivery Drone

This was my first experience in drone development as a part of Vertically Integrated Projects with Dr. James Goppert, Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. The project had several phases of development and learning, which ultimately culminated in the development of a small drone capable of delivering a vial of medicine. My team and I presented this work at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference.

Drones in Agriculture

The goal of this project was to develop a simulation platform to test a coordinated system of a drone and a ground robot to navigate a crop field and detect weeds. I used ROS2, Gazebo, and PX4 to develop and test the simulation platform. Further, I used the YOLO object detection algorithm to enable weed detection. I presented this work at the Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium, for which I was awarded the Student Choice Award.

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uas simulation

Feel free to read the paper I wrote as part of the conference. Below are a few pictures from my symposium talk and at the award ceremony with Dr. Saraswat and the team.

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Medical Delivery Drone

I. Testing Crazyflies

To develop our understanding of the code underlying mechanics and code behind drone development, we tested ideas using Crazyflies. Here are two videos of Crazyflies attempting a coordinated pattern formation and another of a Crazyflie flying in a pattern.

II. Path Finding Algorithm — Rapidly-expanding Random Tree

Here is my implementation of the RRT algorithm during my study and experimentation with path-finding algorithms for use in drones.

III. Final Project: Medical Delivery Drone

Here is the poster the team and I presented at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference. The final drone is shown in the picture along with a picture of the full team and collaborators on the day of the test.