How can undergraduate students gain experience working with UAVs?

Carnegie Mellon University and DJI hosted their third annual unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) workshop for the RI Summer Scholars. Since 2006, DJI has grown into the world’s leading producer of consumer and professional unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. As a company, DJI has long been on the frontier of new technologies that are safe, easy to use, and follow their principle of “form follows function”. They produce the gateways for creators to make their vision come to life.

In this two-day workshop, scholars used various DJI platforms and technology to compete, in teams of 5, in a unique challenge presented by DJI. This challenge consisted of utilizing DJI’s mobile SDK platforms and the Spark UAV to follow markers. Scholars were challenged with utilizing DJI’s mobile SDK to detect aruco tags, use them to guide the UAV’s motion, and projecting an augmented reality image on the last aruco tag.

It was an intense process that ended with one team’s Spark detecting and following ten of the markers. As a prize, the winning team member was generously awarded an Osmo Pocket, a 3 axis stabilized hand-held camera, by DJI as well as an expedited internship interview process for the next summer. Sam Wang, DJI Robotics Software Engineer, gave a public demo of the Mavic Series, which utilizes user hand controls to maneuver. We would like to thank DJI and Grace, DJI HR Supervisor, Kalyani, DJI SDK Engineer, and Sam, DJI Robotics Engineer, for all the time and effort they put into making this workshop possible and for giving the scholars an opportunity to work with their amazing technologies!

More about DJI:
https://www.dji.com/company?site=brandsite&from=footer