HackDrone

Inspiration

"Create the Games of Drones" from Swisscom: Both Marko and I come from robotics background, and as such are very interested in robotics safety. When it comes to drones, specifically, the issue of active obstacle avoidance is a bottleneck stopping drones from reaching their true potential whether it's mapping applications or drone delivery.

What it does

It's a user-friendly simulator that works out of the box. The operator can easily:

Select a flight plan via source and target location anywhere on Earth
Prototype different obstacle avoidance approaches
Simulate different drones

How we built it

We used google maps api to create the base map layer. Using swisscom's Involi datastream, we offer a real-time display of aircrafts over Switzerland and nearby areas. We implement a drone model and obstacle avoidance algorithm that takes into account the live aircraft data. Finally, we simulate the automatic flight path of the drone on a user-friendly interface.

Challenges we ran into

Coming from embedded systems and robotics background, we had little UI/Frontend experience. Learning how to use jQuery to build the simulator and communication between client and server end were the two biggest issues that we faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to create a working UI that's easy to use, while also including drone model and some simple obstacle avoidance strategies in a such a short time.