Mediator

The Mediator was my capstone design project at Rutgers. A research group at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department had developed a quadcopter that could land on water and transition into underwater navigation. However, since radio communication is strained underwater, they used a tether to control the drone while it was underwater.

I worked as a researcher at the Cyber Physical Systems lab at the time, and our research focus was using acoustic transducers (speakers) to communicate at longer distances and higher rates than radio waves are capable of underwater.

Our capstone group decided to combine the two research projects, and implement the experimental acoustic communication on to the hybrid drone. We were successful, and were able to demo a PoT at the Rutgers swimming pool.

I developed an application to run on a Raspberry PI that would accept both radio and acoustic signals from the control center, translate both to the format accepted by the drone, and pass them along to be executed. The code for this application can be found here.