Skyeye: Optical Localization for Autonomous UAVs in GPS-Denied Environments
Using Machine Vision to enable UAVs to navigate without GPS.
The rapid adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offers significant advantages in the defense sector, but also exposes vulnerabilities. Electronic warfare, particularly GPS jamming, poses a critical threat, rendering many commercial UAVs inoperable. While inertial navigation systems offer resistance to jamming, they are prone to drift over time. Optical navigation emerges as a promising solution, enabling reliable and jam-resistant navigation.
Vulnerability in Strava Home Address Privacy
Using inference, the location of a protected address can be determined within a hidden zone.
This article details an information leakage vulnerability in an activity-tracking app called Strava. Strava enables users to record and share their activity metrics, including location details, in a social media format with friends and the wider community of over 120 million users. Strava has faced scrutiny from privacy advocates, notably in 2018 when it inadvertently exposed the location of secret military bases and again in 2023 when its heatmap feature was found to potentially leak users’ home address locations.
Building a Robotic Car with Facial Recognition
Our team developed a vehicle designed to search for and navigate towards humans.
In our embedded systems class, my team and I developed a robotic car equipped with a camera to scan for people and navigate towards them. This project combined hardware design, embedded programming, and computer vision to create a vehicle that could drive autonomously. Our goal was to create a robotic car that could be placed on the ground, look around until it saw a human, navigate towards the person while correcting its path around obstacles, and finally stop at a set distance at their feet.
