Week 1: Final Project Idea

This week, I worked on designing the CAD for the plate of a Mini Drone. The frame has cutouts for small brushless motors and for a standard 30 x 30 mm flight controller + ESC combo. A potential final project that uses this design is a small drone that composes a larger drone swarm or uses two frames per drone to make an octocopter in an extremely compact form.

This final project idea comes from my want to create a sensor drone swarm; applications have already been found in person finding, gas leak detection, and 3D mapping. There are a few pre-existing solutions for mini drones, but none fully address what I would want from a potential unit of a swarm. The most popular consumer mini drone is the tiny whoop class. These drones are a lot of fun to fly, but they do not have sensors other than a gyroscope and accelerometer used for controls, and they cannot be configured to pilot themselves or piloted from a central control. Another current solution is the Crazyflie drones. These drones are controlled in a swarm and can be adapted to additional sensors; however, they are expensive at 240 dollars per unit (incredibly expensive for a swarm) and use brushed motors.