Building and Programming Aerial Robots: As part of the Bergen County Technical High School Internship Program, students participate in research activities at the SAS Lab. In this project, students work on building, programming, and testing a quadrotor drone and gain experience in areas such as mechanical design and fabrication, control systems and automation, programming, and machine learning for computer vision.
SAS Drone Project: This project aims to develop a custom-built quadrotor platform for AI and cyber-security research at Safe Autonomous Systems Lab (SAS Lab). The drone will be equipped with a customized flight controller, computing board, and various sensors such as a stereo camera. Some parts of the drone, such as the enclosure of the onboard computer, will be designed and 3D printed in our lab. Flight tests will be conducted to calibrate the sensors and tune the flight control parameters. The flight tests will occur in the SAS lab that includes an enclosed flight area (drone cage) equipped with motion capture cameras. In addition, programs and algorithms such as collision avoidance and waypoint tracking for autonomous operation will be developed and implemented on the drone hardware.
Aerial Manipulator: In this project, we aim to equip a DJI Mavic Pro 2 quadrotor with a gripper and arm mechanism and object tracking capability. Quadrotors with manipulation capability and physical interaction with the environment enable a wide range of new applications. For example, a quadrotor with gripper can autonomously grasp and carry a payload in a remote or possibly dangerous environment that is not easily accessible for humans.