I led a team of five students in the creation of a YOLOV11 powered machine learning drone. The drone is equipped with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin and a Pixhawk 2.4.8 flight controller working in tandem to enable the drone to identify and track its target.

I trained the custom YOLOV11 algorithm to improve detect times by 300% by limiting the identification parameters to only people and creating an algorithm to skip compute on stagnant frames. I integrated this algorithm with the NVIDIA Jetson to enable fully onboard computing.

I also designed the drone chassis to house all electronic hardware. To begin I did center of mass calculations to determine the optimal placement for each hardware component to ensure that the drone is perfectly balanced. After finding each component placement location, I designed a vibration isolated mount and enclosure for the Jetson, flight controller, and camera.

This project is currently in progress and I will update this page as it continues.