We have divided the project into three major goals to be achieved: flying, avoid obstacles and cooperate. We set as a primary objective to be reached before the end of the Fab Academy, to fly and then, once reached, start working on the other two that represented the real innovation and strong point of the project.
The degree of autonomy that we want to give to the drone and the way we would like to do it are two features that, as far as I could see, are still absent.
The drones actually called autonomous follow GPS coordinates and the autonomy is not the result of artificial intelligence of its drone.
As regards the cooperation instead, as also mentioned by Daniele, it is already more examples of cooperation, but low-level and none of these involves the union of more drones to form a unique identity. Below are some examples of existing cooperation:
As we did for the goals, it is appropriate to divide the materials and components in three categories:
Obviously, the materials required will also depend on how many objectives, between the ones we set, we can reach.
Wood will come from a local supplier, same as for the PLA we will use to 3D print small parts such as supports. Daniele developed satshakit, so it will come from OpenDot Fablab, but obviously, the component of which is made or the other electronic parts, are all made in China.
As with regards to the type of materials used, the cost will depend on the how many objectives we can reach.
Obviously this will be an expensive project. It's too early to know now the exact cost of all, but I think it will costs around 300 euros. The most expensive parts will be: ESCs, motors, sonar sensors and the Android smartphone.
We will try, at our best, to make/develop by ourselves the following parts:
I think, according to Daniele, that we will use several and heterogeneous processes. In fact we have to deal with:
You can read about the tasks we've defined in question 10. You can find also the schedule ot the task in this final period of the Fab Academy.
I would say that the main question which I hope to answer is whether we will be able to fly a drone with most components produced by us. Once we had the answer to this question we should consider other things, like understand how to deploy sensors and smartphones or how to develop in an efficient way the artificial intelligence of the drone.
Along with Daniele and with the suggestion of Massimo, our local instructor, we made a list of tasks to be carried out and we have scheduled to run. Use the Gantt chart is a way to have a constant visual feedback on our path should proceed from now until the end of the Fab Academy. For the realization of this Gantt we have modified a template taken from http://dhtmlx.com.
In the Gantt we split tasks graphically among us: the yellow represents the aspects that I will have deal with, the red ones of Daniel and with the light-blue parts in common.
We will evalute this project by effectively reaching three macro milestones: