The Problem:

Small and cheap drones currently have limited uses. They are limited by the amount of weight that they can carry and what they are equipt with. The majority of drones today are used for arial photography and flying entertainment. There are few drones out there that can autonomously find objects and pick them up. There are even fewer drones that can do this for different shaped objects while still being affordable for a drone hobbyest. The problem for us is that there is no drone that can autonomously find different and oddly shaped objects and retrieve them, while still being affordable.






Our Assembled Drone

Our Solution:

The Granny Copter is our solution to this problem. It is a UAV capable of retrieving oddly shaped objects. This is achieved by outfitting a hexacopter drone with an advanced gripping system that is capable of picking up small objects of virtually any shape. The system is designed to utilize camera tracking software in real time to locate and navigate to desired objects from the the air. After identifying an object, the system autonomously lands above it, lowers to pick it up off the ground, and then flies to a predetermined location.

Team 20

Block Diagram

Documents

Our power point slides (PPTX) for the Priminarily Design Review (PDR), the Midway Design Review (MDR), and the Final Product Review (FPR), along with PDFs of our Midway Design Report, our Final Design Report, and our Poster Template.

PDR

(Click to download)

MDR


Midway Design Report


Final Design Report


FPR


Poster Template



Zachary Roy - zrroy@umass.edu
Peter May - pjmay@umass.edu
Timothy Macmannis - macmannis@umass.edu
Noah Smith - noahsmith@umass.edu

Our Advisor, Weibo Gong - gong@engin.umass.edu