Author: Ethan Nowery, Email: nowery@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 07/28/2024

Last week I posted a picture of the ant farm in which I drew a red line to show the path that the drone would follow. After finishing the ant farm this last week, we were able to fly a DJI Avada drone through the course to test it out. This is a clip from one of the initial flights. It shows the drone flying to the end of the first level, moving around and trying to score points on the visual task in the corner while fighting its own turbulence. Then the drone has to use the visual task to line up with the 18“ by 18” hole in the floor to descend to the next level without crashing. From there, it continues on to the tasks on the second level and third.

This week we traveled to the Montgomery County Fire Training Facility. There they have a high bay building that has a mockup of several storefronts and a street. Inside this building, the mockup is 4 stories tall that you can walk through. They want to use the area to fly drones for terrain mapping. There we met multiple fire fighters and their division chief as well.

One thing that still catches me off guard 8 weeks into this internship is the variety of organizations that NIST works with. What is more impressive is that all of these organizations that I have mentioned throughout this blog (FBI, Capitol Police, FREI, Montgomery Fire) are all contacts of my project leader, Adam. Every single one of these places were asking for Adam specifically and its just astounding how many he is involved with. I feel like every other week I find myself saying “wait, we're working with who?”. Some that I haven't mentioned yet also include the Department of Homeland Security, Washington Police, various local and federal bomb squads and first responders, ICRA, IROS, RoboCup, XPRIZE etc. It's just crazy and inspiring having all of these high-profile agencies wanting to work with you.

Throughout this internship, I have had the privilege to observe and work with experts across many different fields of work. Honestly, it has been an eye opener and also an inspiration to get back on track when im back in Vegas. There are different skills that I need to work on in order to be better rounded, like coding and other technical skills. I would like to pivot my attention away from just building things with wood, i've already proven that I can do that and this summer has only cemented those skills as well.

This week we finished up the ant farm and started flying it with a drone. We added the tasks in order to provide a scoring aspect to the ant farm. As we approach the end of the internship, I have a presentation to work on about the projects that I did this summer. These last couple weeks I plan to work on that presentation and also gather info and data that I need for that presentation.