UAV Competition - Trip

This post was originally published by me at calgaryuav.com but has been moved here, with a few edits.

At the end of April 2017, our team sent 9 of its members to their first ever competition. It was an amazing success and a great showing of the team's competitiveness against much older and more experienced teams.

From left to right, our competition team: Romas Krivelis (President), Richard Nguyen (Electrical), Mason Brothers (Electrical Lead), Dante Forcinito (Mech), Peter Shmerko (Mech/Pilot), Justin Bagga (Mech Lead), Eddie Lam (Mech), Sojhal Brochal (Electrical), Ming Tong (Vice-President/Pilot), Dr. Svetlana Yanushkevich (Team Academic Advisor)

Competition Details

Day 1 - Travel Day

We had our plane disassembled and stored in this custom made box. We were lucky WestJet allowed us to load this box on their plane. It ended up costing us only $25 to transport this box all the way to Quebec. Here it is at the airport, just barely fitting through the luggage scanner.

Montreal flight was delayed by several hours. Our group split in Toronto. Me and Justin flew to Montreal with the box, and the rest of the group flew to Quebec City. We show up in Montreal much later than planned.

We get our box into our rental van and start the 5h long drive to Alma, Quebec.

Day 2 - Competition Starts: Presentations, Inspections and Practice Flights

Competition officially starts at 6am, we arrive from Montreal just before that. Opening ceremony. Team presentations. Schedule is revealed for flights and presentations. As luck would have it, we are the first team to present.

We lost some points on our presentation, as a rookie team, we were surprised by the format of the presentation. But we continued on, assembling our plane and getting ready to pass inspection. Here we are waiting for judges to inspect the plane.

We passed inspection quite easily and were given the go ahead for a practice flight. Here's Eddie and Mason transporting our plane to the field.

Final pre-flight inspection, communications check, control surface check, camera check. All systems good. Cleared for takeoff. And we're off.

Many teams cancelled the practice flight due to gusty winds that day. Our plane flew very nicely. We did a few circles and re-tuned the control system for the lower altitude in Quebec. It was a great opportunity to prove ourselves after not doing amazing at the presentation. The judges were already impressed.

Day 3 - First Day of Missions

Lining the plane up on the runway and final inspection. Preparing for 7: 00AM takeoff. Another early wakeup for the team.

Loading on the mission for the day. The mission was chosen to cover the required area and exclude the forests.

Pilot and co-pilot watching the plane as it flies autonomously. Plane is also monitored from the ground station via 2 separate communication links.

About 5 minutes into the flight we experience a problem. Photo stream dies and the plane is no longer capturing images. Ground station team is trying to bring it back. But no avail. Seems a bug has caused our software to lock up on the plane. We try to remotely reboot the plane's computer. Success! Photo stream is back! But that lasts only a few minutes before locking up again. At this point we give up and focus on monitoring the plane. We continue the full mission as planned.

Plane coming back for a landing after completing its mission.

The judges are impressed by our flight again. Unfortunately we have virtually no usable data from the flight.

Back to our apartment to fix the issue before tomorrow's flight! Meanwhile mech team works on preparing the final report.

Debugging with our onboard computer connected to the TV.

We hear about other teams flights. The team right after us had their quad crash in the middle of a forest. Many other teams also experience crashes and flight cancellations. Here are some crashes that happened close enough to the runway to be captured.

Day 4 - Final Day of Competition and Ceremony

We fixed the issue the night before. It was a storage space optimization we made right before the competition. It was supposed to increase the number of images we can store on the plane without running out of space. That part got re-written and we were ready to fly again!

Plane on runway again. Mission loaded. All checks passed. We takeoff. We get the fastest time between mission start and takeoff of any team.

We fly a very similar mission to the first day. Except we capture data successfully this time.

Then we start analyzing the picture data. Here is an example of the pictures we captured (a flock of geese in lower right corner of the picture).

This is a screenshot of our custom program (aptly named Goose GUI) being used to identify species and assign GPS coordinates to individual geese.

We use this image to show our geo-tagging accuracy. The picture on the left is our picture tagged with GPS coordinates by our software. The GeoImgr tool takes these coordinates and finds their location on Google Maps (right image). As you can see the center of our photo lines up almost perfect with the red marker, meaning our accuracy was very good. Judges told us other teams in the past have submitted reports with GPS locations on the other side of the world.

We finish analyzing data and hand in the report. Then the team splits between going back to take naps and staying to watch other teams fly and crash.

We end the day with a closing ceremony. Lots of foods and many laughs as we reflect on the last few days.

SUAV on stage accepting our awards.

Day 5 - Travel Day Back

Driving back to the airport, we learn that both of our flights are cancelled.

Fortunately, Aleck from back home is able to get most of the team new tickets out of Quebec city. But me and Justin aren't so lucky, we have to wait a full night in Montreal. At least we have the box to keep us company...

Reconstructing the box at the airport parking lot.

Plane and box arrives safely in Calgary. Team finally gets some sleep.

Results

We achieved 6th place overall out of the 13 teams that made it to the competition.

While our ranking may too impressive here, our score was weighed down heavily by our report and our presentation. Based on our mission scores, we would have tied for 3rd place.

There was some confusion on the report requirements, and ours ended up being several pages too long. The organizers did not mark anything over the page limit and we received 0's for many of the categories. In addition we lost points for our report being too technical. Those interested can see our report here.

See the competition details for presentation score explanation.

It is also worth noting that all other teams with the exception of Windsor have had previous experience at this competition.

Our Proudest Accomplishments

• Tied 3rd place for mission component of the score
• One of the only teams to not have a single crash
• One of the only teams to fly everyday and not cancel due to wind
• Fastest time off the runway out of any team (<90sec)
• The only team to build an airframe from scratch this year
• Described as a very professional team at the closing ceremony

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Acknowledgements

I would like to mention everyone else who has contributed to the team's success this year. If I missed someone, contact me and I will fix the situation.

Our amazing Academic Advisor:

Dr. Svetlana Yanushkevich

Our wonderful team mentors:

Alan McNaughton, Mario Forcinito, Ryan Woo, Encoh Tsang and Chris Simon

Mechanical team members who unfortunately we could not bring to competition:

Chris Melendez, Jason Der, Tahmid Khan, Tejus Gangadharaiah

Electrical team members:

Mark Lai, Ada Lee

Our business team members:

Michael Gibbons, Aleck Grenon, Anubhav Gupta

Our social media guru:

Danielle Fung

Our generous sponsors (see the bottom of our webpage)

Update: See the sponsors at calgaryuav.com/sponsors