Drone Masterclass Summer School

We ran another Drones Masterclass on the 23rd July for the Engineering Summer School. The venue was a bit different this time as we had a classroom for building and were flying out the back of the building. This meant we had a lot of height to play with, as you can see from the picture above. The drone is high up to the left of the pipe. I'm amazed we didn't lose any over the wooden fence to the left (it was very close), but we had one stuck on a first floor window ledge and one had to be extracted from a hole in the brickwork.

The main problem we had this time was the dust. The weather has been so hot for ages now, that we were flying in 30 degrees Celsius with dust covering the ground. As soon as you spun up the rotors on the drone, that dust went everywhere and I think it got to all of us in the end. Flying on the metal stairs was preferable.

The rescue from the window ledge was interesting. Here's the CASA X frame stuck on the ledge. It's pointing towards me, so I need to lift and drift right (left relative to the picture) without hitting the wall. Then I need to lower it down to the ground, hopefully still keeping away from the wall which we all know will follow the laws of aerodynamics and suck the drone towards it.

You only get one go at this, so here we go...

Lift, drift and land perfectly. It was all a bit of an anticlimax, but that was the first successful rescue. I managed to get one of the students to film the whole thing with my RunCam, but it was all over in seconds and her aim with the camera wasn't that good, so you can't actually see much. The second rescue involved Jose with a bit of bent coat hanger skilfully extracting another drone from inside the brickwork. I'd hate to have had to leave it there bricked in forever, but thankfully we got it back.

This is the little guy who had the lucky escape, you can see the clogs of dirt on him from inside the brickwork

And from the side you can see the mess - I'm just happy to see him again

Elpida got some good shots of me flying the FPV drone inside. I was allowed to do a bit of a hover in the centre of the classroom in order to demonstrate the googles and camera. Her tweet is here:

Year 12 pupils from across London building & flying mini drones at our @uclcs @in2scienceUK bio-inspired robotics summer school! @YoEgovuk @CASAUCL @en_topia #ThisisEngineering #Drones4Good pic.twitter.com/tUtk6uXPKL

— UCL STEM (@UCLEngEdu) July 23, 2018

This is my own effort using the HubSan camera on the drone. As usual, I've misjudged how much the camera looks down. When I tried to look in the window where the drones were being built, I only got up to the window ledge:




The students were really amazing this time. One of them got the question about what the MAGZ sensor was displaying as I tilted the drone up and down (gravity with respect to body axes), plus there were also discussions about aspect ratio, sweep and winged drones versus multirotors.

As usual, thanks to Elpida (@UCLEngEdu) for running the event and UCL computer science for allowing us to tag onto their Summer School. Also, @en_topia for the whole #drones4good concept, plus our three helpers Jose, Anna and Tianjiao, without whose help we would never be able to do it.

#drones4good