AUVSI Student UAV Competition

[danstrider]

Wow, nobody ever posted anything in here!

There are more students than admit it who participate in the AUVSI Student UAV Competition in the UAV forum. Perhaps those guys would like to start up discussion about the competition here...

Main Site:
http://www.bowheadsupport.com/paxweb/seafarers/default.htm

Competition Teams:
http://www.ncsu.edu/stud_orgs/ar/
http://aeweb.tamu.edu/aeroel/buzzard/index.html
http://www.cuuav.org/
http://www3.uta.edu/faculty/reyes/AVL/Default.htm
to name a few...

Where are you guys????
Dan

[tnavressdog]

...

[CAFplanekid]

Sounds like an interesting competition, I am not involved with it but I would like to be. I am a Freshmen at Purdue and am on the team for the AIAA heavy-lift competition, and am having a great time with it. At alot of other schools Freshmen are only on the team to fulfill the requirement and only do grunt work on the stuff, I am in charge of the motor and power system selection and setup. :) I might post something about one of our planes later, I am not sure how much I am allowed to talk about it.

Jonathan

[hobbyguy4]

Hey John,

Good to see you on here. How are Pete and Rowdy coming along? I keep tabs on it with your yahoo groups, and so far it is looking good. Senior design projects for aero 451 just wrapped up yesterday, and now there are only about 6 r/c and UAV projects on campus that I am aware of. If and when you have the time, now as the semester winds down, let me know if you are looking for extra work. Almost all of our work is rotory based, but having a few additional fixed wing assests couldn't hurt.

Sean

seanhenady@litemachines.com

[danstrider]

6 uav projects!!! I'm happy that there are two big UAV projects at NCSU and I'm deeply involved in both. Geez, six. Lucky :-)

Dan

[danstrider]

I hear there are 22 teams signed up to compete in the 2006 student uav competition. Not sure who all is showing up, but figured I'd compile a list of last couple years and leave open the floor to others suggesting the missing entrants...

1. NC State University
2. Mississippi State University
3. MIT
4. University of Santa Clara
5. Cornell University
6. NY Polytech Institute
7. Istanbul Technical University
8. University of Manitoba
9. Park College, Maryland
10. University of Texas at Austin
11. University of Kentucky
12. Virginia Comonwealth University
13. Virginia Tech
14. California Poly Pomona
15. University of Texas at Arlington
16. Southern California University
17. Texas A&M

I think FSU may be one of the new teams, as well as Georgia Tech. Any ideas for the others? Anyone know teams that may not be coming?

Dan

[djklein21]

Hey Dan,
My name is David Klein. I am UCSD's project manager. Our team has been very quiete due to my instruction. I wanted to be the sleeper team. I think you will really enjoy our aircraft. It is very commercially viable and professional quality. It is not an RC plane. We have successfully integrated our autopilot and tuned the gains for reliable and safe autonomous navigation. I will post more details as well as pictures on Wednesday night. We are having our final meetings tonight and tomorrow night only concerning packing. We have a long way to travel, and a lot of gear to bring with us. I am counting on some prize money to aid in travel costs.

I expect that the level of competition will be much greater this year. I hoe your airframe is up for some windy sorties.

Good luck to all the participants.


David Klein
UCSD

[danstrider]

Hmmm, I'm curious now David, what is "not an RC plane"? Helicopter? Some commercially available UAV?

Since the competition is in two days, I doubt anyone can duplicate hardware, so I figure I might as well share a bit too. See some pics of our vehicle at the bottom of the post.

I am very interested in your imagery systems. From the looks of the no-fly zone, the search area will be HUGE. I doubt windy-flying will be the issue, rather surveying such a large area. I am very interested to see how many teams go with live video versus still imagery. We're going with some hi-res still imagery this year since video didn't work like we hoped last year. Hopefully the in-flight downloading will work *fingers crossed.*


FWIW, we have never been ripped off by another team as a result of being open on our website ... at least not the past two years. Micropilot did add some functionality based on our stuff last year. Imatation is the greatest form of flattery, after all.


Best of Luck David and to your whole team. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's systems this year!

(I stepped back from a leadership role this year to sort of an advisor, so I should actually get to walk around and see what others have to show, hehe)

As with David, I'll take pictures as I am allowed and I'll surely post some here. RC Groups could use an injection of student UAV's to generate some crazy new ideas!

Dan

[djklein21]

How well does your micropilot function? Have you had any reliability issues

[danstrider]

Not seeing poor reliability issues this year with the Micropilot since we moved to a better serial link. We have had trouble in the past keeping RF connectivity. Other than that, the Micropilot does well flying a standard vehicle so long as you stay within its operating range. It won’t do turns past 30deg and it certainly doesn’t turn on a dime, but it’ll keep the wings level and heading toward a waypoint better than an RC pilot can do.

It doesn’t like wind so much though. I am getting nervous with the tropical storm weather headed up the coast from Florida. By Thursday/Friday I imagine any rain will get here just in time for us to be flying. Last year, our 8ft Senior Telemaster didn’t work so well flying in the wind and we had to go to manual a couple times to save the Micropilot. Hopefully *fingers crossed* the weather will hold out so we have calm days for competition.

I’m curious about your 12ft behemoth with the 86cc engine. What is your flight speed with that? What kinds of payload weights are you carrying? We went with the 12ft Telemaster to have the ability to carry beyond the 7lb of the 8ft Senior Telemaster, but we’re kind of convinced now we could do the mission back with the 8footer.

And the ever-present question, what imagery system are you running? Seems like you guys have some cash to pump into it; did you go with something COTS hardware wise? We went with a Nikon SLR to fill in gaps the Pentax Optio s4i left last year.

I’m interested to hear more…
Dan

[djklein21]

Wind will not be an issue for us. We tuned in our autopilot in windy conditions gusting past 35 mph. The plane/autopilot didn't seem to notice a bit.

We ran into some snags with our payload this year. We had to revert to a more simple, but very reliable video based system.

[danstrider]

New information on our website, including pictures and our paper. Results come tonight in a couple hours at the awards banquet!

Team Website...
http://ar.goosetechnologies.com

Aerial Imagery...
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=531527#post5629930

Dan

[rclinks2002]

Hello,
I am working a UAV project on my own time, but I am also a student at Embry Riddle (engineering) I am having an issue solving a long range video problem. I did not notice, do you guys have live video? Also what sort of range are you experiencing? Thanks

Ben Mitchell
mitch86c@erau.edu

[danstrider]

This year, we did not have live video at all. Last year we had lots of trouble with RF links for seperate data and video when trying to recombine them on the ground, so we stuck with just digital imaging this year. It, however, was real-time, so it had the apperance of video to most. We're getting very good range as far as the competition is concerned (3 miles+, way beyond LOS for this competition) using a 400mw 802.11g with a 8.5dbi omni onboard and 23.5dbi grid on the ground. Reliability of the pointing is typically more the problem.

What kind of issues are you having? Hardware? Link margin? RFI?

One of the two Embry Riddle teams had the longest range flight with live video that I have ever seen in person today with a solid link. You weren't on one of the Embry teams were you? If not, you might consider searching them out on campus also; there is a 50/50 chance the team I saw is on your campus even and they definitely have a good answer I'm still hoping to figure out :-)

Dan
Dan

[djklein21]

Well congratulations to the University of Manitoba. They kicked some butt and won the whole thing. We had some issues on the flight line and had our 2.4 Ghz video link jammed. We flew autonomously, but had some minor issues due to being rushed by our live video issue. Here are some pictures of out team and flight.

Our aircraft is a home built copy of an RnR APV-3, 12' wing span, 34lb GTW, 450 mile range, 8 hour endurance, speed range 35-120 mph.

Our autopilot is a Cloud Clap Technologies Piccolo unit. It performed exactly as advertised. I can't say enough about our positive experience with this system.

I would also like to acknowledge our sponsors, Northrop Grumman Unmanned Systems in Rancho Bernardo, Ca and Nasa Dryden. Northrop donated most of our budget. Nasa Dryden loaned us our autopilot and ground station as well as donating a lot of time mentoring us. Without this help we would not have accomplished what we did.

[rclinks2002]

Dan,
Digital Real time?? so you ran it into a computer then transfered it down your RF link? I am trying to get the video range up to about 15+ miles. Also I looked at your teams website and I think I am going to try to build the camera gimbal that is shown except using a Thermal infrared camera.
With regards to the competition, I am pretty sure my campus did not have a team. (I am at the Prescott AZ campus) I assume this because I have talked with all the professors in the EE department, and they think we should start up a team. So right now my entire UAV is self funded. Also we are afraid to bring the school into the project since we have the wheels rolling on a contract with the government.
After looking at the competition website, our UAV is not a UAV, but a RPV, the particular mission (which I cant list in great detail) it would be too difficult to program a computer to do certain things while still keeping the cost of each airplane down to about $2000, and easily built in a short amount of time.
I will let you go.... I need to enjoy my day off of work....haha


Ben Mitchell

[JustinONE]

Hey what's the deal with the gas engines? or is that a different class competition, CSULB has been instructed to only use brushless motors with NiMetalHyd batteries.

Just had our first meeting on the project and this is our first year involved, so I will have many questions.

[danstrider]

Hi Justin,
I think you may be referring to a different competition... maybe the DBF heavy-lift?

Ben,
Sorry man, I think I missed your post! I'm not real sure about how to get that kind of range ... RF isn't my specialty. Feel free to email if you ever have questions though, I'll do my best to answer!

Dan

[danstrider]

wow, nobody posted since last year

I think this thread is dead.