Skip to main content

Review of Drones for Good Award - Message of Hope



We stumbled on the organization that's making head waves around the globe called Drones for Good Award. Although the coveted prize money is not openly advertised, various companies have participated over the past few years such as: PrecisionHawk, LoonCopter, Drones against Tsetse and many more.

We were pretty impressed especially with LoonCopter. This is drone which is capable of air, surface and underwater navigation. The aim is mainly for search and rescue and the proof of concept was demonstrated at the award.


But what's more fascinating is the culture and ethos this organization promotes. The idea that drones CAN be used for good and SHOULD be used for good. This is something we at Uav4africa believe immensely. The notion that you can use technology, whether in the air or under the sea, to uplift, educate and empower underprivileged communities is beyond a nice gesture, it's calling all of us should respond to.

One of our projects is to investigate the production of methane (an agricultural bi-product) and drone technology. The problem statement is to provide farmer a sustainable and low-cost solution to aerial capabilities to their operations such as: grazing land analysis (image processing), fence perimeter surveillance and much more. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up the Tarot T4-3D gimbal on the Pixhawk 2.4.8 with Specktrum dx6 Gen2 toggle switch

So i took the challenge of setting up the Tarot gimbal not just for inherent stable video footage but also the flexibility of controlling it from the radio control. However, I encountered quite a few challenges which made me aware that I'm not the one only in this battle . It's quite clear that the setup of the Tarot gimbal using its own software is completely different from how it's been described in the Ardupilot/Arducopter webpage and in mission Planner. In Mission Planner and it's associated site makes one believe that it should be done through software, only to realize that in actual fact the setup is more complex than that.  After two evenings of trying various combinations, I realized the getting the pixhawk Aux channels to communicate with the T4 gimbal requires the following steps: - The Pixhawk Pin9 (Aux1) needed to be activated to pass through user-chosen channel from the transmitter. For the Dx6 Gen2 it was the channel 6, which can assigned the ...

Matlab to C/C++ code development - Some learning points

Over the last few years, the engineers at the company have invested both their time and sleepless nights in formulating a process for the development of Machine learning algorithms that will satisfy real-time constraints with minimal RAM usage. This is quite a tall task as per default, that would force one to do their development directly in C language. Although that seems like the right choice, the downside is the direct correlation of the debugging time with algorithm complexity.  Such a time could have been rather used in optimizing the algorithm within the MATLAB environment which has excellent tools for the analysis, plotting and debugging. So it was decided to rather learn the Code generation process with the hope that future algorithm could be designed in a similar fashion without the hassle of the compiler-specific run-time issues. The development of this machine learning algorithm would eventually be implemented in a 32bit, 160Mhz speed, 260KB RAM microcontroll...

Setup ArduPilot flight modes with DX6 Gen 2

Hi, I've looked around the web to get an understanding the setup of the Ardupilot flight modes with a Spektrum DX6 2nd generation and there was none. So I decided to write this blog. The few things to consider when doing this: Please follow the instruction given on the ardupilot webpage . Have the Pixhawk hardware connected to Mission Planner (I have 1.3.50 - Copter V3.5.3)  Use the display bar in the Radio Calibration page as a guide while changing the rate pulse widths on your transmitter. I've used switch D to change the pulse width ranges on channel 5.