Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Club

A team member tuning the PID controller of the UAV for stable fight.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Team

The UAV Club is a community of UAV enthusiasts offering students the resources to learn the skills required for designing and developing autonomous systems.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Club At a glance

Number of Members:

32 members in 2017-2018

Team leaders:

Sam Udotong - President, Communications Lead
Marshall Wentworth - Vice President, Hardware Lead
Marcus Boorstin - Computer Vision Lead
Sims Gautum - AI/Algorithms Lead
Kevin Castro - Hardware Co-Lead
Cherry Liang - Finance Manager
Kris Frey - Modelling Lead
Jacob Shearman - Communications Co-Lead
Ben Eysenbach - Computer Vision Co-Lead

Year began:

2012

Advisors:

Jonathan How

Location:

N51

Team goals

The club builds a vehicle for the annual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Seafarer student competition.

Some projects include a UDB3 controller board development, our first project, which involved programming a flight controller from scratch, and interfacing it with an RC transmitter; SkyCall: a project to lead tourists with a UAV; MIT Prime: a project to deliver packages from dorm to dorm using UAVs; TechFair: a project to display and fly company logos at a tech expo on MIT’s campus; and World Urban Forum: a project to explore applicability of UAVs in disaster relief.

Notable quirks

One of our first autonomous quadrotors decided to go for a swim in the Charles River instead of navigating to a waypoint while we were testing it.