Hands-On Flight focuses on making human machine interaction natural. Using simple hand/finger gestures, you can control a drone with operation of a glove. The hand/finger movements you perform are sent to and processed by a phone application that will make it possible to control the drone. The movements performed on the glove are sent to the phone application with the use of Bluetooth communication. After being processed by the phone application, the movements are sent to the drone utilizing WiFi communication.

Eternal Flight's goal is to address the problem of the short battery life in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) by allowing the ability to operate continuously without the need to land. This is achieved using a novel system called IFS (In-Flight Switching), in which a larger "parent" drone switches the drained battery of the smaller "child" drone, effectively increasing the child drone's time in flight. The child locates the position of the parent drone using geolocation and positions itself above the parent drone.

The LGS Drone Scout is a millimeter wave radar system capable of detecting a small UAV or drone in a targeted area. Rotating objects such as the propellers on most drones create distinct micro-doppler signatures in the radar's return signal. By analyzing the change of the frequency components of this signal in relation to time, the existence and certain characteristics of a drone can be deduced.

Communicating with groups of people during an emergency situation is an extremely important and challenging task. The Cloud Control project aims to create a crowd control solution using a hexacopter drone. The project consists of a ground control application (GCS) which records the user and transmits their voice data to the drone. The drone is equipped with our custom chip and a speaker system which will amplify the voice messages to a target on the ground.

BLIPS stands for Bluetooth Low energy indoor positioning system. Our goal is to track the movement of doctors, nurses and equipment in an operating room using Bluetooth Low Energy devices that are placed in the employee's ID cards. 3 - 6 Bluetooth beacons will be placed on the ceilings of the operating room to accurately triangulate the employee's position using RSSI values. This data is then sent to a server which gives real time location tracking of the wearers in the room.

There is currently no effective way to quantify courtship patterns among ostracods (tiny crustaceans that produce luminous courtship displays throughout the Caribbean). Waterborne Autonomous Low Light Electrostereovideography (WALL-E), is a submersible low-light camera that can be deployed in tandem to analyze these courtship patterns using computer vision techniques. This capstone project will develop a system with the following features:

● waterproof stereo camera setup with the ability to record onto an SD card for further analysis

As technology advances, so does society’s ability to help those that have physical disabilities. TiresiaScope’s objective is to help the blind by creating a headset that can assist in mapping their surroundings. We accomplish this through mounting various ranging sensors around a headset, and then notifying the user of the location of objects through sounds. Direction towards nearby objects will be relayed via musical notes in surround sound, and the tone of the note will vary depending on distance. Potential additional features include a camera or Bluetooth.

SPOT is an experimental human communication interface designed for astronauts in conjunction with a human-computer interaction team at NASA. The goal of SPOT is to reduce an astronaut’s cognitive load while maximizing productivity during future space exploration missions.

SPOT accomplishes this goal by reducing the reliance on vocal communication for distribution of information between astronauts with an easy to use wireless forearm mounted wearable device. This device is capable of real-time transmission of vital information such as alerts, location, and images.

The UCSB Hover Hand Team’s goal is to control a quadcopter drone using the Hover Hand. Recording of the hand may result in a more intuitive and precise method of control over the common RC controller. The glove will act as the transmitter to the drone’s receiver, relaying the chief flight controls. Recording hand movement in a way that allows the position and orientation to be accurately and meaningfully described is another important aspect of the glove’s operation.

The advent of drones has brought innovation to many markets. Agriculture, online retail, and a variety of other spaces are now looking to drones to solve many of the problems they have struggled with for decades. We are expanding upon the existing PixHawk microcontroller by adding a number of state-of-art sensors onto a much more powerful microcontroller. In addition to this, we will improve the PX4 autopilot software so that a drone can be piloted with this new system.