Top view

Powerline detection from drone when the drone is flying above the powerlines during inspection.

Front view

Powerline detection from drone when the drone is flying in between the powerlines during inspection.

Powerline detection from drone

Powerline detection from drone with obstacles like towers.

The drones used for powerline inspection or commercial purposes(aerial photography/filming/recreational) has a hard time identifying the powerlines(or any line for that matter) using obstacle avoidance system.

The algorithm uses computer vision features like Houghlines Transform, canny edge and gaussian blur. These images along with masked data are the training images sets for the neural network. The Neural net uses point cloud feature similar to PointNet but in 2D. Each coordinates of the pixels are considered as a point and the masked images are used as training data. A lot can be improved further to develop an in-depth algorithm to detect various other objects.

ShapeShift locomotion 1

ShapeShift can go through tight gaps by shapeshifting

ShapeShift locomotion 2

car to snake and back to car

ShapeShift locomotion 3

Movements in all four directions

The conventional robotic snakes are inefficient in locomotion and as the size of the robotic snake increases the complexity in controlling degree of freedom increases. Designed a robotic snake which can shapeshift using 3D printed mecanum wheel thereby increasing the dexterity of the motion and provides better applications.

Designed the robot to shapeshift from car to snake with precision control using servos. Robot can move around forward, backward and most importantly sideways. The bot can move like snake with ease than the conventional design. The bot can also crawl through pipes. The bot can carry objects easily with out aid and transport where necessary. The bot can change shapes from conventional car mode to snake for ease in locomotion. The robotic snake has better dexterity which can aid in pipe inspections used in nuclear power plants, gas power plants and chemical plants. The bot can carry objects and deliver without human interventions.

New York City has

This can also be applied to many other industrial carriers which uses 2 wheel mechanism.