Personal Information Gathering System (P.I.G.S.)
Overview
Personal Information Gathering System (P.I.G.S.) was my UCSB computer engineering capstone, sponsored by AeroVironment. Five seniors built a drone system that gathers situational information around the user for safety, controlled through a mobile app with multiple flight modes.
Duties
- Served as hardware lead, constructing each drone platform from the ground up for the capstone system
- Installed and configured flight-control software on each drone and validated control reliability before integration
- Integrated and verified onboard hardware subsystems so sensors, compute, power, and communications worked together in flight
- Supported implementation and testing of four operating modes: Orbit, Explore, Bird, and Radar
- Co-authored capstone documentation and the conference paper submission
Gallery
Professor Yogananda Isukapalli, Matthew Tran, Yifan Pan, and Tianrui Hu at ITC 2023
Process
System design. Orbit Mode streams video while drones circle the user. Explore dispatches one drone to a map location. Bird climbs for a wider FOV. Radar places drones at set points and runs CV models to detect nearby objects.
Recognition. Faculty Choice Award at UCSB Computer Engineering Capstone Day 2023. Cliff Aggen Student Paper Award at International Telemetry Conference 2023; two teammates and I presented in Las Vegas in October 2023. ITC news coverage.
Documentation. Capstone project website, paper PDF, and slides PDF.