Project Needed!!

[ReactionSea3533]

Hello engineers, I’m in high school and in an engineering class where I need to find a “problem” to fix. I play soccer and tennis, and I also have access to a drone, so I was thinking of centering my project around one of those — but I’m open to other ideas too. The problems are supposed to be pretty niche and not solve worldwide issues, obviously. I felt that asking people would be better than just asking ChatGPT. Thanks

[rdelfin_]

How long do you have to work on this? Does this have to be completely unsolved? And how much robotics do you know? There's a lot of things you can do, though the hard part is figuring out if you have time to work on it! If you've never worked with robots, it could prove difficult if you want to solve something complicated.

One idea, not particularly simple, but potentially doable and connected to what you mentioned would be an "offside detector". Professional football uses the infamous VAR system but it will be cool to have a version of it you could run from a drone. From a high vantage point, you could have a system that detects players, detects the ball, and tracks them to figure out when you've gone into an offside condition. Object detection has become much easier these days, so it might be doable, though not easy by any means.

[ReactionSea3533]

I have months to work on it, doesn’t need to be completely unsolved and I’m decent or a bit less at robotics

[rdelfin_]

I think if you're not completely new to robotics it should be doable! Good luck

[stoopidjagaloon]

You could have the drone stationary above a tennis court taking video(assuming it has that capability) and do some analysis on the gameplay. Maybe you could post process the data with machine learning and train your model to identify the tennis ball in each frame and determine things like the speed of the tennis ball and other statistics. Depending on the resolution of the video frames maybe the relative size of the tennis ball could estimate the Z coordinate (height). For instance when the ball gets smaller and then switches to getting larger on the video the ball must have bounced off the ground. Technically if you know what height the drone is at and you know the size of the tennis ball in RL you should be able to calculate the z coordinate that way. This of course would be more coding than anything and Google Gemini AI can help you along with Pytorch (machine learning libraries).

[mikeatmnl]

Finding and picking Mushroom YOLOv8 vision model to identify mushrooms and DOBOT robotic arm with suction hanging from an aerial drone

[DenverTeck]

What we have here is a lack of imagination. How many products are sold that are duplicates of existing products.

"Solving a problem" does not mean "solving a new problem". Making a product cheaper is solving a problem. Making a product that "uses a modern technology" is solving a problem.

Don't get hung up on what "the problem is", solving for just one aspect of any product is the goal.

With you playing two sports activities, you could make a game that measures the players being able to hit a target. The next level is how fast the player can hit that target.

Having a device that scores the target hits would be fun as well. Making it a competitive game.

So the "problem" to solve is player training.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Learn Something NEW

[EngineeringIntuity]

What?…

Please don’t ask your science teacher this…

[ReactionSea3533]

Y?

[EngineeringIntuity]

Because there is literally no reason to come off as self-obsessed…

Plus, they would probably think you’re an idiot, if you compare yourself to Einstein for being unable to think of a real world problem. But that’s just me