There already is a very simple safety mechanism on the drone: if it goes out of the controller’s range, it lands. However, we thought of another one: sticking a small bottle of bleach under the drone. In the event of a crash, the bottle would break and spill the bleach everywhere, killing any bacteria that might have leaked out of a broken tube.

We also investigated about how we could turn our drone and give it on-field analysis abilities. It appears that the required technology is out of our reach within the frame of the iGEM competition, but that might be possible by using a microfluidic circuit and a small photosensitive cell. The microfluidic circuit would allow us to manipulate the cells one by one, and the cell could be quickly analyzed by the photosensitive cell. This even has two interesting side-effects: the measurement time should be way quicker, due to the single cell exposed, and the drone would be able to perform way more measurements in a single flight.

During the project, we thought about coding a software that would allow us to control our drone remotely, through a computer. The idea would be that a GPS-based software could lead to automatic mapping and to a more efficient flight planning. However, we contacted some professionals about this (Edouard GUILHOT, from Civic Drone), and they showed us how such a software was coded. It appeared way more complex than what we originally thought, and it involved some extra electronic components that we did not plan on adding to the drone. We therefore had to drop the idea, and stick to a drone manned only through a controller.