An autonomous drone that locks onto a human face and follows it in real time. I built it to teach myself computer vision and control, through Harvard’s CS50.

The vision pipeline runs in Python with OpenCV: detect the face in each frame, then translate that position into flight commands that hold a constant distance and orientation to the subject.

The real problem wasn’t detection, it was control. Raw detections are noisy, so the drone would twitch. The work was in the smoothing and the feedback loop that turns messy data into flight that tracks fluidly.

The banner links to a short demo of it in action.