The goal of our capstone project is to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle that can autonomously navigate an unknown environment while simultaneously creating a 2D map. This 2D map will be streamed in real time to a host computer that communicates with the vehicle over Wi-Fi. This makes the system extremely useful as a means of determining the layout of a potentially dangerous environment without risking human life.
The system consists entirely of off-the-shelf hardware, much of which uses open source software. Additionally, a large amount of our software consists of manipulating Robot Operating System (ROS) nodes which are also open source. By using off-the-shelf hardware and open source software we are able to avoid spending large amounts of time working on low level details. This lets us spend the majority of our time developing the complex flight algorithm necessary for the system to navigate the environment in a safe and time efficient manner.