For the past 5 years I've been working with PX4-based drones. PX4 it's an open source autopilot firmware that can be run on different COTS flight controllers like pixhwawk or CubePilot. My journey with drones first started in my mechanical design course during college. As a final course project (Caracas, 2018), our proffesor back then, Miguel Torrealba made us think and come up with a mechanical payload that could be attached on a drone. My team built a prototype of a drill mounted on a really basic robotic manipulator called "Taladron", a merge between the spanish words for Drill and Drone (Taladro + Dron). It was a silly short project but it was definitely enough to light the spark of curiosity regarding this machines. Some of the other students came up with different creative solutions like a drone that cleans windows.
After that course, i was granted the possibility of attending a winter exchange semester in the Czech Technical University in Prage (CTU). During this semester I focused on studying an array of courses not related to my degree in Mechanical Engineering since I was more interested in Electrical and Computer Science topics that would form part of my "Electives" I ended up getting 36 ECTS credit semester and studying a range of interesting topics I could not find in my already degraded and beloved Simon Bolivar University in Caracas due to the Humanitarian and Economic crisis of late 2010's in Venezuela. I hope to cover this topic on another blog post since I would like to relate my early struggles with bad technology infrastructure and how the monetary control system in Socialist/Communist Venezuela led me to first get in contact with Bitcoin in 2012 as a mean to fight inflation and save money.
Fast forward a few months and I found myself struggling with the mathematics and state-space representation of nonlinear systems like drones and ESA (European Space Agency) LYSA satellite formations. This semester in Prague was hard, I rarely had any time to go out with other Erasmus students on trips to nearby cities like Vienna and Budapest. However, I enjoyed the beauty and tranquility of Prague in Autumm and Winter, it was my first time living in a European city during a full winter. I made some really good friends during this time.
Check more about my time in Prage and CTU.
I came back to Venezuela to finish my Mechanical Engineering degree and to complete a 5-month internship in Supermetanol, a subsidiary methanol plant partly owned by ENI-Italy (Ente Nazionali Idrocarburi). I worked as an intern in the inspection team including a not-so-important nitrogen pipe network into the Risk-Based Inspection plan of the company. During this long hours of walking under the Caribbean sun, I was thinking on how a drone that was able to fly between the intricate pipes would be very useful to create the isometrics needed to apply the RBI methodology from API (American Petroleum Institute) that explains where to take ultrasound wall thickness measurements to monitor rust and other degradation mechanisms found in a refinery.
That's it!