OpLink

Summary: I competed alongside 5 other engineers in Aggies Invent: Reimagining Naval Power, a weekend-long invent and pitch challenge hosted by TAMU and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Our team was tasked with inventing and pitching a solution to the problem of Navy pilots being unable to trust autonomous aircraft in their airspace. After extensive research and collaborative brainstorming, we developed OpLink—a two way communication system that bridges the communication gap between human pilots and autonomous aircraft, ultimately building trust in autonomous aircraft. For our prototype, we created a script capable of two way communication in tactical brevity code using the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Google’s Cloud Speech API, the Speech Recognition library in Python, and Python’s text to speech library gTTS. We then had our program write to an Arduino depending on instructions it received, which controlled a model plane that we designed in Fusion 360 and fabricated with CNC machining. This prototype served as a key element in our pitch, as we were awarded best prototype and finished 3rd overall. View our full pitch deck here.

Our team demonstrating the feasibility of OpLink with our prototype by enacting a full flight mission

All of the participants after the competition