• 8 Aug 2016
  • Kickoff

    The course was kicked off with a lecture from Patrick Christ giving an introduction to the project and the Python libraries available for drone control. The technical challenges of the first day were to get familiar with the drones, implement manual controls and extract camera frames. In the afternoon Laura Bechthold lead a thought provoking case study tackling ethical questions of drone usage and decision making.

  • Deep Learning Session

    On the second day Dr.Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi held a lecture on Image Processing and Object Detection, which was complemented by an introduction to Deep Learning by Patrick Christ. After the theoretical input sessions, the students had to train a network to recognize hand written numbers using Nvidia's DIGIT System, before starting to implement their own classifier.

  • Autonomous Flying Attempts

    After a swift session on PID Controllers by Sebastian Schlecht the students spent their time putting the concepts they learned the previous days into practice. First autonomous flying attempts were made - with varied success.

  • Ideation Workshop

    After half a day of further development and coding the students engaged in a Design Thinking workshop lead by Dr. Felix von Held and Felix Werle from the Institute for Innovation and Change Methodologies. In a structured approach the students ideated creative business cases related to autonomous drones and presented them in front of the class. As the deadline kept getting closer, the students optimized their algorithms in an all night long hackathon.

  • Race Day

    The final day of 2016's drone elective was kicked off by a keynote speech presenting a current drone-related research project. Following that the entire team went to TUM's Informatics department in Garching to test the developed solutions by competing in a race through a small obstacle course.