UAV Engineering Intern

A ten week NSF research program hosted by the University of Idaho. The idea was mine. A drone flies in, drops a small tracked robot near the part of a site that matters, then keeps watching from the air while the ground robot handles what is on the floor.

I directed what we built and in what order, and I owned computer vision, communications, embedded bring up, flight modes, and the dashboard. The mechanical people on the team owned CAD.

On vision we hit 98 percent success identifying people in distress, running YOLO on a Jetson Orin Nano in the air and a Raspberry Pi 4B on the ground robot. On comms I built a 4G LTE video path targeting under 50 milliseconds of latency, with a 915 megahertz radio carrying odometry.

I earned my FAA commercial drone pilot license during the program, so field flights happened under a real remote pilot in an approved area. My teammates were Soyoung Moon, Nicholas Ruiz, and Nicholas Woodburn.