First of all – thank you for the warm welcome into the DIY drone family. I am very grateful that so many people spent some time on reading my first blog post about the USAV.

So the idea of what exactly the USAV is, is starting to form, and while there are a lot of practical stuff to work on (changing frame, gluing nuts and bolts, deciding which configuration to fly), the more abstract thoughts about what the USAV should do has to be developed alongside.

One of its features should be the possibility to give it some kind of task, and let the brains of the USAV solve the task. This may sound very AI, but even AI is in its heart a bunch of formulas and computations.

The USAV could in some regards be seen as an autonomous satellite, with a bunch of sensors on it, which it should utilize to solve the task at hand. We have camera, magnetometer, accelerometers, Wi-Fi radio, GSM/GPRS radio, microphone etc… and could be equipped with even more sensors. Also remember that internet is available during the operation.

As with all life (even Artificial Life), life must have a purpose.

So today I would like to ask this wonderful community for ideas of what kind of tasks the USAV could be asked to perform. Any suggestions are welcome, fun, useful, technically demanding….

To start you off – here are some of my own ideas

• Find all public WiFi’s in the area. Requires: Built in Wi-Fi to located public accessible Wi-Fi and measure the signal strength
• Measure GSM signal strength in the area, find dead spots. Requires: Built in gsm radio
• Find a red car. Requires: Built in camera + pattern recognition
• Follow me – The USAV follows the persons every move. Requires: Person to broadcast his position to the USAV
• Fly to (some address). Requires: Functionality to resolve addresses to gps coordinates, built-in camera + some intelligent way of determining a good landing spot.
• Map area – use onboard camera to create a detailed aerial image. Requires: Camera and some image stitching functionality

Please leave a comment describing

1)      The task

2)      Special requirements (sensors, setup etc..)