Looking to find out what Pakistani graduate students are working. At Consuldents, one of the projects on display is Autonomous Drones. Sign up today to view FYPs like these or upload your FYP today to get featured to the industry network.

About the project

“In barely a century, the world has gone from inventing manned flight to pioneering unmanned flight. It’s breathtaking.”- Matt Scassero, University of Maryland.

Yes, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is good but an Unmanned Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (UAAV) is bound to be better. Drones have been in use of the defense industry for a long time. Only in recent years, however, it has been made possible that drones are finally finding their way into commercial markets.

The emerging global market for business services using drones is potentially worth more than $127bn, according to a 2018 PwC study. Even though drones are being started to be used in variety of different areas like agriculture, security, infrastructure, transport, mining and of course media, there remain some hurdles limiting their usage. One of the most widely faced hurdle is the autonomy of drones.

Making unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) didn’t made the drones pilotless, it only made them unmanned. There still remains the need for a pilot to control the drones remotely. This is the problem that we hope to resolve in our Final Year Project (FYP). Let us assume, if a postal service decides to use drones for delivering their orders, they will need first to hire pilots for piloting them or they will need to train their workers to be able to fly the drones, which will not be very efficient economically. Making drones autonomous will not only help solve problems such as these, but will also boost the usage of drones to expand to other niches which are capable of using drones.

In our engineering design, we plan on installing a sensory unmanned aerial multirotor quadcopter from scratch which will not need any human intervention during its flight even if it encounters an obstacle during that time. Obstacles will be detected using sensors mainly Lidar, Radar, Ultrasonic, Infrared and optical flow sensors. On encountering an obstacle, the data from the sensors will be fed to an onboard computer which will be running an obstacle detection and avoidance algorithm specifically designed for the purpose. That algorithm will form the basis of the instructions issued by the onboard computer for avoiding that obstacle.

What is special about the project?

In terms of this project’s specialty, we are not using the existing expensive solutions of the problem, which involves SLAM based mapping and vision-based object detection. These existing solutions are expensive as they require high computing power and high definition visual sensors. Our project is going to have a low cost as compared to these mentioned, because we’ll use sensors to detect obstacles. The obstacle avoidance Algorithm won’t require a high computing power.

FYP student group

1. Muhammad Sarosh Ali
2. Muhammad Qasim Qureshi
3. Usman Naeem Satti

University Name – Bahria University