- 15 engineers led
- £1,000+ raised and managed
- 18 months running
Eighteen months leading the Imperial College Drone Society’s flagship build: a drone that crosses an obstacle course autonomously. Machine and deep learning for perception, custom electronics designed for the airframe rather than adapted to it, and an in/out system built for fast turnaround between runs.
The drone was not the hard part. Fifteen engineers over eighteen months, most of them volunteers with their own coursework deadlines, was.
- Recruited the team, selecting for people who would still be around in month twelve.
- Ran weekly sessions, which is the cadence that stops a volunteer project quietly dying between terms.
- Raised over £1,000 and managed the budget, deciding what deserved scarce money when every subteam wanted their component first.
- Assigned and tracked work so subsystems converged, instead of each sitting at 80% done in parallel forever.
- Documented as we went, so the project survived people graduating.