Autonomous Drone Missions

By the Acton Academy Eagles

Over the past few weeks studio members have used the programming languages like Python 3 to program drones to autonomously complete different task missions. View their completed missions, and vote on your favorite.

View completed drone missions and vote on your favorite using this form.

CLICK the title to see more details about the mission, to view the code the person created click the code button, to view their drone run click the video button

The GOAT: Greatest of All Tellos

By Ian Watson-Hemphill using Python 3

DESCRIPTION

My drone will go through the following steps:Take off.Follow the coordinate directions provided and rotate the amount provided to find the secret message.Decode the secret message by the given key.Turn the decoded message into HSV values for the drone to track.Rotate until it finds a large object of that color.Move up/down/left/right until the object is in the center of the drone’s field of view.Move forward/backward until the object’s height from the drone’s perspective is the given amount.Land.

CREATIVE PROCESS

My main process was to list off the steps of what needs to happen in order for the drone to complete the mission. After that, all I had to do was find the right code for each step. Additionally, I worked with Donovan a lot and we were able to do a lot of brainstorming/debugging.

The GOAT: Greatest of All Tellos

By Donovan O'Leary using Python 3

DESCRIPTION

My code is supposed to take off by a height determined inside of a mission file. It will then move forward, backward, left, and right using more information on this mission file. Then my drone (Suzan) will take a picture of a code and decipher it, the result of which will be the name of a color (such as orange or blue). My drone will then look around for this color until it is found, where it will fly towards and land in front of it.

CREATIVE PROCESS

If you have ever seen a toddler learn how to speak English, you will understand my creative process perfectly. Each coding project started with me wondering “I wonder what this means?”. After I began to grasp the content, I would then look for resources that would help me to complete the project, until I had enough resources to feel comfortable writing code, where I would then brainstorm with Ian to debug and complete the code. And so The GOAT was born (Greatest of All Tellos).

Grand Prix

By Evelyn Williams using Scratch, Python 3

DESCRIPTION

This code is designed to get my drone from its starting location to a predetermined location based on provided coordinates, then use a webcam to record and decrypt a secret code, then fly the drone to a specific color and land. A lot of headaches went into this project and I hope it works.

CREATIVE PROCESS

I don’t know if I had a “creative process” but what I did was look up pieces of code I needed or didn’t understand and used previous knowledge to combine code until it looked like it could work. Then it was mostly trial and error, watching my drone crash into walls and yelling at it.


Grand Prix

By Eli Carll using Python 3

DESCRIPTION

For this challenge, I had to detect a shape placed at an unknown location in the room. Once the shape was detected, my drone was to fly towards it, stop, and then land in front of it.

CREATIVE PROCESS

In order to accomplish this, I found that breaking the assignment into smaller, more manageable pieces helped make the problem more straight-forward and less confusing. From there, it was just researching the different modules I would need to run in order to accomplish my goal, but it was learning how to break the assignment down that really helped me in the end.

Grand Prix

By Aanika Dalal using Python 3

DESCRIPTION

In this challenge, the drone is programmed to fly to a given location based on coordinates, take a picture of code, convert the image to text, decipher the code which will reveal the name of a color, then move towards that color and land.

CREATIVE PROCESS

In order to complete this challenge, I first broke the code into several smaller pieces which I then could tackle individually. This strategy of breaking down a more complex problem into simpler problems that I can solve proved to be the most valuable strategy I used during this quest.

Grand Prix

By Holden May using Python 3.8

DESCRIPTION

This challenge includes the skills and lessons learned from previous challenges throughout the session.. The drone must fly to coordinates given from a text file, decode a message found in that area, and look for the color code that was hidden in the message. After that, the drone will land in front of the color, based off of the pixel count of the image.

CREATIVE PROCESS

Because of the similarities with this challenge and the previous ones I’ve participated in, I thought I’d be beneficial to use previous working code that I had. Because of this, much of the more complex aspects of my code run in functions that can be easily called throughout the paper.

Grand Prix

By Addie Mahar using Python 3

DESCRIPTION

Our project is called “Are you kidding me?”

CREATIVE PROCESS

Our code uses a collection of packages and tools like OpenCV to direct the drone to its position, take a picture, decode a message, fly to coordinates, and then land in front of a specific object.