Authors:
Charles Jandak — ESE 2024 — c.j.jandak@wustl.edu
Victor White — ESE 2024 — v.a.white@wustl.edu
Motivation & Problem Statement
Being a soldier is extremely dangerous and risky. Countless American lives have been lost in wars. Autonomous technology is being researched and developed so more of our soldiers will not have to risk their lives, especially behind enemy lines. That includes autonomous planes and drones that can do surveillance/reconnaissance and serve as the refueling plane for aerial refueling operations. One piece of technology that has not been integrated into the military is an automated window projectile launcher. For example, say that surveillance is being done on a building that is about to get infiltrated. A drone is able to scan where everyone is inside the building and there is a group of the enemy near an open window, unaware that U.S. military personnel surround the building. It would be a huge benefit to take out anyone with autonomous technology first, before the soldiers have to go in and risk their lives. An autonomous window recognition launcher can recognize there is a window and automatically assume the proper trajectory angle to fire a grenade or flash-bang through the window. There would be a strategic advantage in using that because those would be enemies that our soldiers would not have to deal with, or enemies that would be incapacitated by the time the building was breached by our soldiers.
Given our background and interest to work in the defense industry, we wanted to explore a project that can have a real world impact with our soldiers, and mimic some already available defense technology.
Objectives
- Use Projectile Motion Physics to Model the Trajectory of a Single Flywheel Launcher
- Perform Image Processing to Identify Targets
- Successfully Hit Targets at 5, 10, and 15 Yd Distances
- Integrate Code with a Pitch and Yaw Robot using a Raspberry Pi