NSF CPS

Competition Background

The goal of the National Science Foundation Cyber Physical Systems Challenge (NSFCPS) is to use a multirotor aircraft with downward facing camera, and possibly other sensors, to search for an ideal experiment site for deployment of a soil probe, and recovery of the probe back to base after a pre-specified dwell time. Drylands form a significant portion of earth's surface, yet the surface processes affecting, and impacted by soil, are poorly understood due to undersampling. Student teams will develop a lightweight autonomous drone, a sensor probe, and software to autonomously deploy and recover a probe that will measure soil moisture, air temperature and air humidity. Teams will have to demonstrate autonomous and successful collection of data pertaining to soil using the instrumentation suite. This competition will address the problem of efficient measurement of physical and chemical soil properties with autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).

Team Background

The focus for the team this year is to completely redesign an aircraft that will complete the competition tasks for this year. The aircraft will come equipped with a Google Coral Dev Board, a single-board computer that allows all the computing required for the competition to be done on a single board without having to rely on other computers. As a winning team of the NSFCPS Challenge for the past two years, the team is still looking in areas it can improve and grow. There is still a big effort to recruit new members of all majors in an attempt to have a more diverse and knowledgeable team. We believe that by recruiting members that have knowledge of fields outside of UAS, we can gain valuable insight and information that we can use to further improve our team and our robot.

Robot Features

• Mechanical

  • 3D Printed Drop Mechanism

• Electrical

  • Pixhawk Flight Controller 

  • Raspberry Pi 

  • Pixy Camera W/ IR Lens 

  • Soil moisture sensor 

  • Temperature and humidity sensor 

  • Google Coral Dev Board