Lakehopper 🐝🏞️

Website: lakehopper.pfiers.net

Lakehopper is my long-term project to create a solar-powered autonomous drone that rests on lakes during nights and overcast days. Think of it as a migrating bird that survives off of photosynthesis.

As my Master’s thesis, I developed Lakehopper’s high-level planning software. This system uses a convolutional neural network to identify lakes and buildings from aerial imagery. From this, it generates a navigation graph to calculate the best multi-hop paths between lakes. These paths avoid build-up areas and restricted airspace.

In my free time I’m working on the hardware of the drone. The first version I developed unfortunately experienced a crashrapid unscheduled disassembly on its maiden flight. I’m currently working on the second version.

High-Level Planning Software

You can find the training code and data pipeline for Lakehopper’s machine vision model in the vision folder. The planner folder contains the source code for the planner component.

Lakehopper 1

Read about the design and maiden flight here: Lakehopper 1 Design.

Lakehopper 2

I’m still hard at work on Lakehopper 2’s design and development.

In the meantime, here’s what Lakehopper 2 will probably look like: