🎉 [Congratulations] Senior Researcher Geunchan Lee (Leatherneck Dev) Wins the ‘Silver Award’ at Hanyang University’s Creative Comprehensive Design Competition! 🎉

Hello, this is the QUAD Drone Laboratory.

Today, we are thrilled to share some proud and exciting news. Our very own Senior Researcher Geunchan Lee, who has been leading our excellent blog series under the pen name ‘Leatherneck Dev’, has won the Silver Award at the ‘Creative Comprehensive Design Competition’ held at Hanyang University!

Hosted by the Seoul Innovation Center for Engineering Education at Hanyang University, this competition is a meaningful event where students can showcase their creative, convergent thinking and system integration design skills by planning and building innovative projects.

Senior Researcher Lee proved his outstanding system integration capabilities through the ‘911 FALCON Project’, the development process of which he has been sharing in detail on our blog.

The 911 FALCON is a continuous disaster response system designed to overcome the limitations of existing search drones, such as short flight times and the lack of immediate initial response capabilities. It seamlessly connects a drone (for search and relief), an autonomous vehicle (for mobility), and a battery swap station (for continuous operation) to ensure that the ‘search–initial response–relaunch’ loop is never interrupted.

As demonstrated throughout his blog series, Senior Researcher Lee successfully implemented highly advanced hardware and software integrations:

• Battery Hot-Swap System: A sophisticated housing design featuring an ideal diode and a locking system, which enables automatic battery replacement while maintaining the drone’s power for a true hot-swap operation.
• Custom Mount & Electrical System Design: Efficient spatial layout and vibration-reducing mount designs for core components, including the PDB, Flight Controller (Pixhawk 6X), and NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, within a limited frame space.
• Seamless Communication Architecture: A robust communication network that continuously updates the drone’s return destination (Rally Point) in real-time by tracking the moving rover’s GPS coordinates.

We are incredibly proud that his passion and technical expertise to secure the ‘golden time’ in disaster situations have led to this amazing Silver Award.

Please continue to show your support and look forward to the future developments of the 911 FALCON project and Senior Researcher Geunchan Lee’s upcoming endeavors. Congratulations once again on winning the Silver Award! 🎊