AUVSI Senior Project

Summary

The ECEN department at Brigham Young University is introducing a new senior project beginning Winter 06. This project will be headed by Dr. Clark Taylor and Dr. Randy Beard from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Tim McLain of the Mechanical Engineering Department, and Dr. Mike Goodrich of the Computer Science Department. The primary goals that the students will strive to achieve are:

(1) getting a model airplane to fly autonomously
(2) planning a course to efficiently search a pre-determined area
(3) identifying and geo-locating ground targets
(4) dropping bombs (small fishing weights) on a target identified by the user in the video
(5) landing on a ground target.

This will all take place in a team environment where several students are working together to achieve the objectives of the competition. Some of the best students from the class will be selected to represent BYU at the AUVSI undergraduate UAV competition in June. The senior project will leverage off research work performed in the MAGICC and HCMI labs.