EECS 199, Winter 2026

Individual Research: Autonomy, AI, & Drones

Course code 17215

1-3 units

Professor & Class Schedule

Peter Burke

e-mail: pburke@uci.edu

Office: EG 2232

This is an independent study course, so there are no formal lectures.

There will be an “office hours” style lab for enrolled students.

It will be ET 202 Wed 4-6 PM.
ET 437 will also be open during business hours for independent work.

Grade:

A if you meet at least 6 milestones. B if you meet least 2 milestones.

Prerequisites:

EECS 195 Drones.

Course Outline

This is a follow on course to EECS 195 Drones. In that class, students built and flew a drone using ArduCopter as the firmware for waypoint missions.

In this class, the students will continue this work by applying AI and autonomy for the drone flight control. The students already have a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a camera with their EECS 195 drone kit. So they have all the hardware necessary to complete the milestones, listed below:

Milestone #1: Flash Pi Firmware and Connect Pi to Internet

Milestone #2: Connect Pi to Drone Flight Controller.

Milestone #3: Autonomous scripting (on board).

Milestone #4: Autonomous scripting (cloud computer).

Milestone #5: Connect camera to Pi, and stream to PC.

Milestone #6: AI image processing

Milestone #7: AI image processing in the cloud for drone control

Milestone #8: LLM drone control

Milestone #9: Drone swarms (stretch goal)