Auto Drone is, as the name suggests, an autonomous drone. Using various sensors, the drone is able to calculate height off the ground, angle of rotation, and acceleration. Using data from these sensors, an on-board computer is able to increase or decrease propellor speed in order to keep the drone stable.
Auto Drone was created to be a tag-along to an autonomous farming robot. Auto Drone's purpose will be to collect data about farming conditions and types of weeds in an orchard. Data collected from Auto Drone will be fed into a cloud-based machine learning algorithm to identify the types of weeds specific to each orchard. That data can help a pest control advisor to prescribe the proper pesticides, and amount of pesticide needed to control weed growth.
Auto Drone uses completely open-source technology. The main board used for this project is an Arduino Uno. The sensors used are the HC-SR04 to determine height from the ground, as well as an MPU6050 which determines angle of rotation, acceleration, and temperature.