While many undergraduate students are home working summer jobs, relaxing, and maybe playing video games, one student is taking the use of his gaming station to a new level, thanks to a UConn IDEA Grant<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rosse Gates \u201916 (ENG) was awarded an IDEA Grant last year to support his project to build an autonomously controlled quadcopter \u2013 a helicopter powered by four rotors. The grants are available to UConn undergraduate students in any major at any campus, providing funding for students\u2019 self-designed projects.<\/p>\n Gates proposed a quadcopter that could be used to survey and land in disaster areas or other areas that may not be accessible by humans. The novel aspect of his project is that the quadcopter will not be controlled by a human, other than being provided with an initial set of GPS coordinates for its destination. The system would find a suitable landing zone and execute a landing using only decisions made by the on-board computer.<\/p>\n \u201cThe IDEA Grant award has truly enabled me to take my idea for this project and begin to make it a reality,\u201d Gates says. \u201cThe grant provided the funding for me to purchase the equipment required for the project and to devote the time to working in the lab, building and testing the system.\u201d<\/p>\n The quadcopter uses a retail Xbox gaming station\u2019s Kinect sensor to analyze the ground topography and send back a \u201cpoint cloud\u201d of hundreds of thousands of X\/Y\/Z coordinates to one of the quadcopter\u2019s two on-board computers. One computer analyzes the data and makes decisions on the suitability of a landing site and on the actions to take, then sends instructions to another computer that instructs the copter where to go.<\/p>\n Gates’ inspiration\u00a0for his project stems from an incident he read about in Rocket Boys<\/em>, a book by Homer H. Hickam Jr., in which an explosion causes a mine\u2019s deep entrance shaft to be rendered inaccessible to rescue workers. \u201cI really wanted to create a quadcopter that could descend a vertical mine shaft on its own, take 3-D images of the mine\u2019s condition, and return to the surface to show its findings,\u201d Gates says. However, in the course of researching his project, he found that building a quadcopter that autonomously navigated underground was well beyond the scope of his project.<\/p>\n \u201cI then thought, \u2018what if I could land inside that area?\u2019 I would be able to perform the mapping calculations while on the mine floor, sweep a camera around, locate future points of interest, fly to them, and continue the process until an entire area had been covered,\u201d Gates explains. \u201cMy immediate project is to identify the suitable landing areas and navigate to them \u2013 mapping may come later in the project.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"RGatescopter2[1]\"](\"http:\/\/d45h139.public.uconn.edu\/sites\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/RGatescopter21-300x200.jpg\")
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