Project Overview
Project Title: CyFlyBot: Collaborative CyBot and UAV System for Faster Missions
Project Contact: Diane Rover (drover@iastate.edu)
Client/Company/Organization: ISU (Faculty)
Description
In this project, our team is designing a collaborative ground-air robot system for warehouse inventory management. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) work together with the direction of a central computer (HQ) to locate and identify items on warehouse shelves. The UGV is based on the CyBot platform used in CPRE 2880, and the UAV is a Crazyflie quadcopter. This system forms the unmanned ground-aerial system (UGAS) called CyFlyBot.
The CyFlyBot prototype will be demonstrated on an indoor test field with small-scale shelving to simulate a warehouse environment. The UGV drives between aisles while the UAV rides on top of it and, at each aisle, the UAV takes off for short scanning flights along the shelf face, using its onboard camera and ArUco marker detection to identify inventory items, estimate its position relative to objects, and land precisely back on the UGV. This strategy keeps the UAV focused on brief and precise flights rather than long range navigation, as it has a limited battery life. The HQ computer runs all high level processing including the mapping, path planning, computer vision, and mission coordination, using ROS 2 as the software framework.
Key Design Challenge: The primary challenge is communication and coordination between two robots, all while keeping response times fast enough for safe real time navigation of both platforms. A second challenge is the computer vision pipeline. The UAV must reliably detect ArUco tags for both inventory identification and precision landing on the UGV, all from a small moving camera platform. A third challenge is ensuring the the full processing pipeline happens fast enough that some processing does not need to be moved onboard the robots themselves.
Faculty Advisors: Dr. Diane Rover (primary), Dr. Jones (secondary).
Team Members
Caleb Sanchez
Software Engineering student at Iowa State. Current SWE at Boon Logic. Focused on computer vision and AI applications.
Ping Wu
Software Engineering student at Iowa State University with experience in full-stack development and robotics, including work on a Mars rover system.
Tu Reh
Tu Reh is a Software Engineering student at Iowa State University, with a minor in Cybersecurity. Tu worked on the MAVRIC Mars Rover project, sponsored by Boeing, where he developed software using ROS 2.
John Brittain
Computer engineering major at Iowa state university with a passion in embedded systems.
Jacob Nickel
Senior in software engineering at Iowa State University with experience in app development, web development, and ARM assembly.
Daniel Bieber
Computer Engineering student at Iowa State University with experience in embedded systems and backend development.
Mitch Fowler
Electrical Engineering student at Iowa State with a focus on Power Systems.