Environmental Impacts

Development of an Automated Drone Charging Platform

Led by Yanjun Li, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus: Harbor Branch
Affiliated Department: Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute
REU Scholar: William Fairman
REU Scholar Home Institution: UOlin College of Engineering

PROJECT

Commercial scale aquaculture farms will require the collection of data, such as oxygen levels, from numerous ponds spread across an expansive terrain. Through a USDA-NIFA funded project, FAU researchers focus on developing an automated process to collect these data using drone technology. One of the barriers to an autonomous drone operation is the short flight time of commercial-grade drones (under 30 minutes). Human intervention is often needed to perform battery swaps, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, this project focused on the development of a prototype automated charging platform for drones that could be used in place of battery swaps. Once fully developed, such system can support 24x7 autonomous drone operations with significantly less human intervention.

Click here to watch the student presentation.