This week, we made a big change to our project. Due to new restrictions on purchasing drones and drone parts, we eventually concluded that using drones was not feasible. Drones that satisfied our requirements were either too expensive or were manufactured in places we could not order from. So, due to budget constraints, we transitioned to a land-based plan with rovers.
This change came with a lot of scrapping work from the last weeks and planning new hardware to order. Luckily, most of the changes were in the hardware, as our software designs can stay mostly the same regardless of vehicle type. We have decided on a rover kit to use for the vehicles, which will be much cheaper than drones per vehicle, likely allowing us to end up with a larger overall swarm. We’ve also made the choices for everything we need to order and will be placing orders next week. Delivery times for these parts are much shorter.
Our general software design plans are made, and we are ready to start implementing software onto our raspberry pi’s next week. Our next milestone is to have two pi’s communicate and agree on a coordinate space using uwb and each pi’s relative position.