To start off allow us to introduce ourselves.
We are a group of senior engineering students based out of Hobart, Indiana USA. We are currently part of an Engineering Design and Development class at our school where we must identify a problem and develop a solution to said problem. The main problem that we found was missing information and lack of situational awareness when emergency responders and more specifically firefighters go in to respond to a call. Our solution to this is developing a fully autonomous UAV response system that we call Scout. Scout is a fully autonomous system meaning that once a fire department has a Scout system it requires no human input to be operated. This means it can respond to the emergency much faster as it can takeoff immediately once the call is received and proved a live video feed to the responders before they arrive. this can help them identify more crucial information that may have been missed in the original 911 call and let them see what the scene is like. We are currently Patent Pending on the concept of a fully autonomous aerial response to an emergency situation. Check out our website for more in-depth details and more about us.
So far in our development, we have been scratch building aircraft and have decided that our final platform is going to be a VTOL-based design due to the ability to hold more of a payload and longer flight times. Our initial testing used the Navio 2 flight control boards but had problems with reliability and build quality with their hardware. Cube pilot was generous enough to provide us with enough materials to not only get our VTOL prototype up and running but also additional QUAD based platforms that we intend to use for testing more experimental aspects such as precision landing and our camera payloads before we put it on our mainstream prototype we have put so much time into developing and building. So far we have had great success with Herelink, The Cube Orange, Here 3 GPS, and the EDU-450 platform. We have had several good flights with the EDU-450 Platform and are less than a week away from a test of the main platform we have been working on developing for the last several months. We plan on documenting the first flight very well and will post an update on here once it has concluded.