We arrived a day before the final. When we arrived the hotel, we try to
have a little rest but a phone call made it impossible. According to the state
law of California, we can only do the demo inside some assigned park because
there is strict law related to unmanned aircraft system. In this case, our demo
location is the Sunnyvale Baylands Park.
Unfortunately,
there were not power line inside the park. We didn’t know what to do.
There was not time for us to be frustrated, we have
to find some other way to demo our Automated Power Line Inspector app. We reached
the park as soon as we can, and tried to find if there are some terrain similar
to power lines or figure out some other solutions. We walked around the park
and found a bridge, we decided to try our app with that bridge. We took off our
Phantom3 and started the app. It was pretty successful but the bridge was too
short that our demo would end in about 30 seconds and the lack of variation
during the path could not demo our app to it’s extreme.
When we were testing with the bridge, some road’s
line was detecting by our app. We thought it might be pretty impressive if our
app can do road tracking as well. We tried to track the road and the result was
less than satisfactory. We discussed together and decide to improve some part
of algorithm in order to make the app adapt better when it comes to road
tracking. Since the drone ran out of battery, we went back to hotel and
modified algorithm while charging the battery.
Back to the park, the new algorithm worked more
than perfect!!
Sunnyvale Baylands Park
