Project Details

The Challenge | Out of This World!

Create an app to pilot an unmanned aerial system (UAS), such as a NASA space drone, utilizing the 6-axis gyro sensor within a smartphone or tablet. The piloting app can be combined with multiple sensors for flight precision and the best maneuverable flight techniques for off-Earth planetary drones.

Pixbae Gyro Piloting App

Pixbae GPA is a the idea to create simple Android app that provides a piloting mode that works with a drone and a smartphone using the smartphone gyroscope sensors.

Pixbae Return

Pixbae Gyro Piloting App or Pixbae GPA

Pixbae Return

About us:

Edgar Perez, Roderick Salcedo, Faustino Arauz. Andrés Jiménez, Beatriz Jimenez, Evelyn Graves, Gerardo Carrasquilla, Gisselle Santamaria, Abdiel Morales, Moisés Chiari.

Section 1 What is Pixbae GPA?

Pixbae GPA is the idea tocreatesimple Android app that provides a piloting mode that works with a drone and a smartphone or tablet connecting directly with WIFI, our app uses the 6-axis gyroscope sensor available in our phones in order to manually control a drone in case of an emergency in the outer space and allow a fluid movement control to pilot a UAS.

Section 2 - Our motivation

From the beginning of mankind we have wanted to reach the sky, like the Wright brothers pioneers of aviation to the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, that reached our Earth moon.

Our “Pixbae Returns” team is eager to create a unique experience, the manual operation of a UAS using a gyroscope, giving us fluidity, speed and efficiency when flying a drone on another planet, almost as the inspiration our predecessors had.

The Pixbae fruit native to Central America, is a plant that reaches up to 20 meters and the only way to take advantage of its fruit is to reach the very top of the palm it grows, almost like reaching the sky.

We return to the beginning of the story now. Pixbae returns.

Section 3 -Explaining our solution

Our solution is to create a mobile app for the easy handling and piloting of a drone, through human manual operation in case of emergency in space. The method of operation is with the gyroscopic sensors of a smartphone or tablet, associating the movement record of the phone in all its axis with the control library of our drone.

In addition, we look for ground-satellite-drone connectivity for easy control and connection of our drone through the use of NASA's Deep Space Network DSN and the future integration of the Architecture for Reliable Operations of Unmanned Systems (ICAROUS) to further improve the app functionaty and drone safety.

Images of our idea, for ilustrationpurposes:

Throtle up

Throtle down

Forward

Reverse

Roll left

Roll Right

Yawleft

Yawright

Section 4 – Additionalinformation

Developmentoftheproject

  • Research how to operate the controller that uses the drone that is “Libardrone”, in order to connect it to an Android mobile application.
  • Make the connection to the phone with the library commands, successfully testing the connection smartphone – server – drone.
  • Develop the front end from scratch with Java using the Android Studio tool.
  • Map the drone control commands (from the Libardrone library) to control it using the gyroscopic sensors of our smartphone or tablet.
  • Retrieveinformation from NASA's resources about the Titan moon its environment and gravity (and possibleplanets to test) to enhance the mobile application.
  • Further development is the creation of the graphic interface in order to control our drone.
  • We worked with the Python and Java programming languages.

Resources used from NASA:

Tools used:

  • Android Studio
  • Flask
  • Libardrone
  • Microsoft Visual Studio

More info!

More information and projectdocumentation can be found at ourpublicrepository:

https://github.com/boodahDEV/PixbaeR