Planet API Shines at Georgia Tech Hackathon

GeorgiaTech held their first-ever AeroHacks hackathon— a two-day event hosted by the School of Aerospace Engineering Student Advisory Council, designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity. Over 25 hours, teams of students from different departments worked together to build fascinating new aerospace engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering projects. Both 1st and 2nd placed teams used the Planet API!

A student organizer, Lubna Zubair sent a recap of the event over to the Planet team. Read her first-hand account.

We had 103 Georgia Tech students participate, work through the night on projects from drones which followed people, to parametric wing design and modelling, to a barn door star tracker. At the end of the event on Sunday, 20 teams presented to a group of sponsor judges in an interactive expo.

The judges awarded the 1st place prize to a Super Solar – a group who used the Planet API to obtain satellite data to calculate the amount of solar energy over an area of land and compare it to another location. This team which consisted of an aerospace engineering major, computer science major, and chemical engineering major built and demoed an interactive GUI using Python, Gtk, and Matlab to demonstrate their analysis.

Imagery of the Georgia Tech campus in the Planet platform

The second place team PlaNET – used the Planet API to access satellite images and geospatial data to compare anomalies to an area surveyed by a camera attached to a drone. This team demonstrated their hack by surveying an area of Georgia Tech’s campus.

Drone footage captured by the PlaNET team’s surveying drone

Get a closer look at what these creative students did with Planet’s API. Read their project recaps:

Portfolios for all the team submissions as well as a list of the winners the AeroHacks website at www.aerohacks.ae.gatech.edu.