Schedule and Milestones

Schedule:

In our schedule, the blue blocks represent the plan for the project and give us a general idea about when we will work on this subsystem. The green blocks are the tasks that we have already finished, while the yellow blocks stand for what we haven’t achieved yet.

Overall speaking, we followed our schedule pretty well. The autonomous flight system was finished by the beginning of February, and we spent most of the time on signature detection and rescue package drop subsystem during the rest of the semester. However, the sound sensor mounting and the electronics for the power distribution board in the rescue package drop system were not completed on schedule. The main reason was that we realized that these two tasks are not necessary because we could directly use the package drop mechanism to carry the microphone during the flight instead of designing a new sensor mounting, and a mobile power bank could simply replace the power distribution board due to the simple power requirements of all the components aboard. Consequently, we skipped those two tasks in the schedule, but focused more on other crucial tasks to make the whole system robust.

Milestones:

Spring 2017

Milestone Date

Task List

02/01/2017

Progress Review7
  • Finalize data collection flight plan

02/15/2017

Progress Review8
  • Test the collected data
  • Test local search on Matrice 100
  • Preliminary test of sound detection algorithm
  • Preliminary test of revised RGB-based human detection algorithms
  • Preliminary test of Thermal signature detection algorithms

03/01/2017

Progress Review9
  • Test microphone mounting
  • Test sound detection algorithm on data collected during flight
  • Test thermal/RGB detection algorithms

03/22/2017

Progress Review 10
  • Test fused thermal/RGB detection algorithms
  • Test signature location reporting software

04/05/2017

Progress Review 11
  • Performance optimizations/scaling to operate within acceptable time  (as per SVR).
  • Develop the processing pipeline(as per SVR).
  • Finish the code migration

04/17/2017

Progress Review 12
  • Test end to end system for search and rescue operation  (as per SVR).
  • Spring demo preparation

04/26/2017

SVE
  • Spring Validation Experiment

Fall 2016

Milestone Date

Task List

09/30/2016

Conceptual Design Review

Initial Planning

  • Define scope of the project and the requirements.
  • Conduct trade studies for parts and approaches.
  • Finalize functional, performance and cyber-physical requirements.

Project Continuity

  • Develop and maintain project website.
  • Design Fall and Spring demo

Project Delivery

  • Deliver Conceptual Design Review

10/20/2016

Progress Review 1

Project Continuity

  • Procure parts

Autonomous Flight System

  • Ramp-up on Hexcopter operability

Sensing

  • Finalize type and model of sensors to be used by conducting trade studies.
  • Test/Validate sensors independently to ensure they meet specifications.

10/27/2015

Progress Review 2

Autonomous Flight System

  • Demonstrate waypoint navigation in a controlled environment (as per FVR)
  • Test against accuracy performance measures (as per FVR).

Localized Pattern Navigation

  • Design strategy for localized navigation pattern.
  • Software for planning localized navigation pattern with acceptable sensor coverage (as per FVR).

Integration Tasks

  • Design and fabricate mountings for sensors (if required).
  • Test flight with preliminary sensors.

11/01/2015

Preliminary Design Review

Project Delivery

  • Deliver Preliminary Design Review

11/10/2015

Progress Review 3

Sensing

  • Software to extract and process data for 1 sensor and associate coarse location and time information with the data.

Rescue assembly system

  • Evaluate and finalize the design and actuators for rescue assembly mechanism.
  • Fabrication of mechanical structure and test the function independently.

11/22/2015

Progress Review 4

Project Continuity

  • Fall demo preparation

Integration Tasks

  • Implement data collection pipeline to transfer data from aerial subsystem to base station.
  • Test end to end system for search only operation (as per FVR).

12/01/2015

Progress Review 5

Project Delivery

  • Fall Demo

12/12/2015

Critical Design Review

Project Delivery

  • Deliver Critical Design Review