Autonomous Drone Integration
Sophomore-year high school internship work focused on taking a VOXL 2 Mini-based drone platform through hardware assembly, wiring repair, QGroundControl tuning, camera bring-up, calibration, documentation, and flight testing.
Phase 01 / System Plan
Broke the internship work into hardware setup, software setup, and flight validation so the drone could be brought up in a repeatable sequence instead of debugged as one large system.
Phase 02 / Airframe
Assembled the drone platform around the carbon frame, protected propeller layout, battery retention, motor assemblies, camera hardware, and onboard compute.
Phase 03 / Bench Work
Inspected wiring, board connections, and exposed conductors before returning to flight testing. Damaged parts were documented and used to plan repairs with mentor feedback.
Phase 04 / Repair Loop
After an unstable flight attempt, one damaged wire was traced to the GPS-side connection path. The rest of the drone remained usable, so the repair plan focused on replacing the damaged conductor and preserving the test platform.
Phase 05 / GPS Repair
After the unstable lift test, the GPS-side wiring and receiver board connections had to be inspected closely. The image shows the damaged connection work that led to replacing and rewiring the GPS chip path before the drone could safely return to testing.
Phase 06 / VOXL Bring-Up
Connected the M0149 tracking camera and M0107 hires camera into the VOXL 2 Mini connector stack, then verified the connection path through ADB shell, QGroundControl, and VOXL portal debugging.
Phase 07 / Sensor Output
Validated camera visibility from the drone's point of view and used the output to continue the perception bring-up path before calibration.
Phase 08 / Calibration
Ran the VOXL camera calibration workflow with a 9x6 target and collected feature tracks across the frame. After earlier failed attempts caused by target flatness, the calibration succeeded and stored OpenCV tracking intrinsics.
voxl-calibrate-camera tracking -f -s 9x6 -l 0.0165.
Phase 09 / System Confirmation
The terminal output confirmed successful calibration and wrote the tracking intrinsics to the VOXL file system, closing the loop between camera hardware, calibration software, and saved sensor configuration.
/data/modalai/opencv_tracking_intrinsics.yml.Phase 10 / Flight Test
The flight test moved the internship work from bench validation into physical behavior. The test cycle produced useful data on thrust response, disarm behavior, damage modes, and the next set of stability changes needed for safer controlled flight.
May 2024
Multiple camera calibration attempts initially failed because the target setup was not flat enough. The final attempt succeeded after improving the calibration setup.
October 2024
The drone armed and spun its propellers, but the first lift-off attempts lacked enough thrust. The team then investigated updated software parameters and QGroundControl configuration.
October 2024
Increasing max RPM from 15000 to 32000 produced enough lift, but the vehicle rose uncontrollably and crashed. The crash damaged one GPS-side wire, which became the next repair item.
November 2024
The camera chip was connected to the VOXL stack and verified through ADB/QGC/VOXL portal work, but the camera output path still required debugging before the stream was usable.
November 2024
The build instructions and BOM were reorganized into a more repeatable manual so future users could follow the same assembly and setup process.
Project Documentation
The public-facing portfolio page summarizes the engineering path, while the linked manual and presentation provide additional project context from the original drone kit documentation.