Week 2 Lab: Flight School

In lab during in second week, we trained to fly the drones to gain experience. The drones, also known as the Galaxy Visitor 3 made by Nine Eagles, are built in with a 1280 x 720 camera and Micro SD card to store the pictures. Following the FAA guidelines, we cannot fly it near people and must maintain visual sight at all times. The drone also uses a Li-Po battery which lasts about 10 minutes.

Galaxy Visitor 3 (GSV 3)

We went outside to a small lawn across Bossone to begin to practice. It was a cloudy day so we were unsure of whether or not the drones would fly well so it was a trial in cloudy weather. Each team spread out across the lawn so that we would have space to fly the drones. We immediately had issues when we had to calibrate the drone with our controller. Many teams were calibrated to other drones and we could not start to fly until they were calibrated to our own controller. Finally after making sure that all other groups were either already calibrated or their controllers were turned off, we calibrated our drone and began to practice flying it. Sena Savaskan and Maria Alfaro flew the drones for a majority of our lab period. They mostly practiced trying to hover the drones in the air. Many times, it was uncontrollable as Sena did not use the remote to maneuver it and only lifted the throttle yet it still flew in unintended directions. To gain more experience with the drone, our first assignment is to form a 3D model of any object after obtaining images by flying.