Booth Id:
ROBO050T
Category:
Robotics and Intelligent Machines
Year:
2021
Finalist Names:
Bormolini, Nicola (School: Istituto Rainerum - Salesiani Don Bosco)
Girelli, Matteo (School: Istituto Rainerum - Salesiani Don Bosco)
Abstract:
Rainerum Robotics is a group composed by students and teachers from the Rainerum High
School. For over nineteen years our team has been developing advanced robotics projects
and has had opportunities to work on various projects concerning the prototyping and
subsequent construction of autonomous aircraft.
While we were analyzing problems related to our territory we realized how important it is to
monitor the health status of large areas of vegetation and detect early possible outbreaks of
parasitic infections.
Thus was born N.I.M.P.H.A. (Neural Network Interface for Monitoring Plants via Hybrid
Aircraft), a hybrid drone that combines the main characteristics of a multirotor drone with
those of an aircraft: this guarantees manoeuvrability and rapidity of manoeuvre (thanks to
the lift of two wings), as well as allowing fast altitude change and take-off and landing even
in the absence of a runway.
The final result of our project is a semi-autonomous droid: a neural network developed by us
and subsequently installed on board ensures that, thanks to adequate sensors, the aircraft is
able to move autonomously and successfully reach a target (in our case, the coordinates that
identify the diseased vegetation area).
But that's not all, there are other numerous possible fields of use for N.I.M.P.H.A, for
example determining the stability of mountainsides and water basins’ volume, support
rescuers in case of disasters and volumetric estimate of landslides.