After typhoon Haiyan devastated Tacloban and areas around it, a lot of UAV's have been utilized to do damage assessments. And some pilots complained that they saw UAV's flying in the area during the relief operations.
As a POC, we have fitted an ADS-B receiver on the DJI M100. The ADS-B messages are passed from our own custom on-board computer and onboard application via Transparent Data communication to the mobile device.
The said on-board computer also computes trajectories of the aircraft around it and can make the DJI M100 (and can support APM) descend or increase altitude to avoid incoming aircraft. Our goal is to have improve situational awareness for pilots (and autopilots) of remotely piloted vehicles.
The ADS-B feature was part of our entry "Project Kwago", to the recently concluded Drones for Good in Dubai (2016). Project Kwago made it to the semi-finals.
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Saankhya Labs (http://www.saankhyalabs.com) has Software Defined Radio (SDR) chips and modules that can be used for developing low profile ADSB modules for Drones (978 MHz UAT Transceivers). Anyone interested, please contact me for more details.
there are limitations on how much data you can send data via the transparent data of DJI. If the DJI M100 is on F mode (auto flight), it can make it descend / climb if needs to avoid incoming aircraft. But if you are on the other modes, all we can do is alert the pilot flying on our own ios app.
The actual objective of the project is to build a low cost search and rescue drone. Hopefully, we will not use it in actual disaster(s) but it is nice to have if in case we need to help out. It can also avoid obstacles using DJI Guidance. If we see an obstacle during auto-flight, it will automatically adjust mission (either by going up, or going around the obstacle).
I have watched your video, Excellent !, you should share more detail on your project
lightbride is a SDR capable radio in my guess. i hope we can deliver something similar to support built in ADS-B while drone is commencing a auto mission. i don't think broadcasting a route will be much useful... drones need computer flight management system integrated into a clould to make anti collision really work.