Entry: 4 | Step count: 4

Whoops, posted this as Entry 3 at first, this is really homework (entry) 4, do not confuse! Entry 3 (black hole edition) will come soon. Relatively speaking.

Alright, while going through the World Maker Faire website, I found that there will be a presentation on drones!

So drones will by my Maker Faire post of interest.

What’s a drone? Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century! Little flying robot. That’s all. The military uses them to survey and kill things, everyone else uses them for choreography, proof of concept, money, I dunno.

So what do drones need? Propulsion, sensors, and navigation. Usually, navigation and location awareness are handled by GPS.

Why do I care? I’m making something that knows where it is all by itself, not something that flies and probably has GPS.

Well, yes. However, part of any good system (whether it be navigation, balance, targeting, mind reading) is redundancy. Your ears may tell you that you’re moving, but your eyes back it up (which is why motion sickness occurs, your eyes are like “we’re still!” and your ears are like “no we aren’t!” or vice versa and your brain is like “FFFUUUUUU”).

Now, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a drone getting sick. At least not sick enough to vomit. There’s probably viruses you can hack into them. But anyway, why do I want redundancy? Because it helps the system to be all the more accurate. GPS is fantastic these days, and probably has its own redundancy systems built in, but it probably has a margin of error as well.

With the addition of my accelerometer based location awareness (using at least 2 accelerometers to help reduce error), the known position of the drone will be more solid, and possibly more rapidly updated since the system is local. Since the system is local, if GPS fails, it can still navigate!