Preliminary Results in IROS Paper Preprint
Design Document
A Bit of History On This Project
After a summer (2013) internship (volunteering) working with Flockbots in the Autonomous Robotics Lab, GMU, I had gained the necessary skills to continue researching. To further explore my academic interests and to get more research experience, in the Fall 2013 semester, I applied and received GMU’s Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URSP) grant. The objective of my project was to develop a MAV system that was capable of searching for and finding an object using control and computer vision algorithms. The eventual goal of this project was to explore the potentials of MAVs in search and rescue missions. During the project I worked independently and shared results on a weekly basis directly with my mentor, Dr. Gerald Cook. In the end of my junior year I presented my system design at GMU’s Volgenau School of Engineering Celebration of Undergraduate Research poster session and received feedback from faculty members. This project really prepared me for future research endeavors because I learned how to write grant proposals, work directly under the guidance of a professor and present my findings to others.
Current Work
In my senior year, with a new URSP grant, I am continuing my initial research idea, now in a holistic approach, as a senior design project. As the Project Manager a big challenge that I faced during the initial stages was talking with the team and expanding the project to cover the experiences and interests of my teammates. The goal of my senior design project is to make a MAV system that could plan near optimal paths in a search map, recognize individuals using a camera with on-board processing capabilities, build a map of the search region and rescue the lost person by delivering a rescue pack. Because of my initial work with quadcopters, my team did not have to spend much time in building or configuring hardware and we started to work on the research aspects right away. Our abstract was accepted by National Conference of Undergraduate Research (NCUR) therefore we will be going to Washington in April to present our initial findings. We will also submit a paper with the final results to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).