Why (I created) ZiptieAI - terrytaylorbonn/auxdrone GitHub Wiki

24.0705

I created ZiptieAI for the following reasons.

• 1 To organize my self-study material
• 2 For the satisfaction of creating a public-facing project that was 100% my own
• 3 To help others build/fly drones

I was in Ukraine in late 2023 and was impressed by Ukrainian drone development. I started exploring drone simulation while in Ukraine. I assumed that building an actual drone (back in the USA) would be the easy part (wrong). I came up with the following concept for my drone studies:

• Ziptie drones: Front-line Ukrainian soldiers often use zip ties to configure a drone package. My focus is on learning the components (HW and SW) that can quickly be "ziptied" together for any mission. Below: A zip tie drone on the cover of The Economist.
  
  
  
  
• AI: Lost connection to the drone pilot? Carry on without him. Want to swarm the target? No problem, send an intelligent group of drones to do the job. You implement the AI routines on a companion computer (a PI4/5 or Nvidia Jetson mounted on the drone that sends flight commands to the drone flight controller). Below: AI object recognition running in a simulator (part (10) SITL (total sim) (1) shows how to this step-by-step).
  
  

My interest with time only grew. And so did my lab notes. So I started organizing them into a wiki/gdrive.

For the past 10 years the results of my work have been

• (1) Not public facing and/or
• (2) Something that was micromanaged into something I would never claim as my own

ZiptieAI is still a rough WIP, but its something I enjoy working on and take personal pride in.

There's a great drone community out there that I hope to be an active part of in the future.