Welcome to the Drone Delivery project! We’re making Starship but with drones!

Imagine a system of thousands of drones, autonomously navigating obstacles, receiving and dropping off packages with zero human intervention. That is a massive project currently being taken on by companies like Amazon, UPS, and Zipline. We’re looking to do that here at Purdue as ARC!

Project Overview

An overview of the goals of this project:

• Determining the path the drone both before and during the flight by using:
  • Geospatial data
  • Path finding algorithms
  • Inter-drone communication
  • Weather data
  • Obstacle detection & avoidance
• Building and designing a drone and drone storage system that:
  • Can carry a meal or small package
  • Withstand collisions and light weather
  • Fly 20 minutes
• Developing backend server and software infrastructure that is:
  • Scalable & Realtime
• Developing fronted software to:
  • Control the drone
  • Manage the delivery operations of hundreds of drones
  • Order deliveries

Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

• Drone that can carry a 1-2 kg package from one end of the IM fields to the other and navigate around known and unknown obstacles
• Evaluation:
  • User loads package on the drone
  • User initiate an order/flight from the website
  • Backend determines a non-linear flight path/plan that avoids obstacles (can be imaginary) and sends this to drone
  • Drone takes flight
  • Drone detects an unknown obstacle like a stadium light post and successfuly navigates around it.
  • Drone releases package at delivery point (can be winch or landing)
  • Drone returns to starting point

Goals/Timeline

Spring 2025

Hardware

• submit general part requests for v2
• test flight v1
• finish building v1. we're barely able to get stuff ordered now so right now so doubtful...
• design v2 (maybe not finish design)

Navigation

• simulate drone