During my internship at Hexagon, I had the opportunity to participate in the company’s 'Innovation Week' a unique event where employees from various teams can collaborate on projects of their choice during the week, with the potential to turn successful ideas into full-fledged company initiatives. I opted to be a team lead, with the goal of enhancing my leadership skills, engaging deeply with an ambitious project and proving that interns can take on initiatives that bring real benefits to the company. My proposal was to develop an autonomous drone using Hexagon/Novatel products, designed as a versatile, in-house tool for research, testing, customer support, and marketing. The project focused on creating a GPS-based drone capable of autonomously following a target, with adaptability built in for future customizations across a range of applications.
Leveraging Hexagon’s technology, I mounted a PwrPak7 on the drone, connecting it to an onboard Raspberry Pi that interfaces with the flight controller. In this setup, a PwrPak7 unit is also mounted on the ‘leader’ and communicates with the drone’s PwrPak7 via Wi-Fi, transmitting their relative positions to the Raspberry Pi. The Pi processes this relative positioning data, calculating the waypoints needed to keep the drone at a consistent, predefined distance from the leader and sending these coordinates to the flight controller.
Currently in progress.... stay tuned for more updates!!