Thorondor is an app for piloting a drone wherever you can imagine. In the near future there will be rotor craft on Mars and then Titan. An intuitive app for piloting an unmanned aerial system (UAS), such as a NASA space drone is essential. Thorondor allows a drone pilot to take over control of the automated drone in the event something goes wrong during mid-flight and the autonomous controls do not work correctly.

Mars rovers move slowly in part because of concerns about the rover hurtling towards danger before a flight controller could command it to hit the brakes, which is a result of the signal delay of 4-24 minutes. A similar idea would be implemented in Thorondor. The team is still analyzing in simulations what the best method of implementation of this is, however, one idea is that Thorondor could use the gyroscope among other sensors in the device, in this case a phone, to allow for operation like a control wheel a.k.a. a yoke, however, Thorondor would limit each movement of the device to one unit of movement of the rotor craft, say 30 centimeters (1 foot), and report back before allowing the pilots movements of the handheld device to contribute to the movement of the rotor craft. Another idea is that this would be accomplished physically through a large platform. What ever is found to be the most efficient operational method will be chosen.

We used the following NASA resource https://www.nasa.gov/aeroresearch/programs/aosp/ut... for a review of NASA research of UAS and developing projects for the future.

The link to our project's code: https://github.com/spaceappsnyc/thorondor