Canadian Team VAMUdeS wins AUVSI sUAS Student Competiton
VAMUdeS group achieved the first position at the AUVSI SUAS Student Competition which was held in St-Inigoes, Maryland. This event gathered more than 30 teams from universities all around the world.
After winning the Canadian competition, team VAMUdeS (Autonomous Aerial Vehicle of the Université de Sherbrooke) of the engineering faculty, Université de Sherbrooke, demonstrated its capabilities at the AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) SUAS Student Competition by achieving the first place overall, ahead of 32 teams from United States, Canada, India and Turkey. The team has successfully completed the three phases of the competition, including the journal paper, oral presentation and flight session winning the “Best Flight” award. The team brings back to Canada the first place of one of the most important unmanned aerial system student competition.
The main goal of this competition is to perform an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission. It includes autonomous navigation and real time target localization. Simon William Kirouac, ground control station operator, states: “The group has successfully achieved a fully autonomous flight session, from takeoff to landing. Once again, the autopilot made it through the complex manoeuvers of the flight plan without being affected by the weather conditions”. Sebastien Leonard-Godbout, safety pilot and team captain, says: “The autonomous flight was so stable and responsive that I didn’t have to think about overriding the autopilot by taking control of the aircraft manually, even during critical manoeuvers”.
The team also managed to localize correctly 5 targets, one of them within 35 feet, identifying their shape, color and heading. Furthermore, the group has handed out target information during the flight session using its advanced real time transmission system, achieving the actionable intelligence objective. “Since our avionics and flight platform are custom designed, the team members have a profound understanding of the system. This provides to our team an outstanding problem solving capabilities which gave the team the edge over the competitors” says Jonathan Bouchard, avionic system designer.
Since the beginning of the year, VAMUdeS has been designing a new system that includes high end aerial imaging systems, permitting the identification of small ground targets with great precision. William Lemaire, imaging system specialist, says : “Our newest in-house designed systems enabled our team to get exceptionally high quality pictures and accurate geo-localization of the targets during the flight session”. The software, avionics and flight platform were designed for real situations, similar to those encountered during the competition.
This victory gives the group the opportunity to represent the Université de Sherbrooke at one of the most important symposium in the UAV business which is held in Washington DC on June 26th2012
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Distributor Comment by Dany Thivierge on June 19, 2012 at 9:58pm
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Comment by Franco Scipioni on June 19, 2012 at 10:04pm -
Awesome job! Congratulations. I'd love to see some specs too. Huge motor.
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Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on June 20, 2012 at 6:13am -
Good work guys! More info please!
Reminds me how pathetic my school was, Ottawa U. Complete lack of serious participation in any competitions because the faculty didn't support anything.
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Comment by Nick Urban on June 20, 2012 at 11:53am -
Your plane was really impressive. It was amazing what you guys could do.
And I'm right there with you R_Lefebvre. I'm the team leader from Bucknell, this was our last year at the AUVSI student UAS competition. We're a team of two and receive no funding from the school, so we pay for everything ourselves. It's actually pretty insulting at times. I asked most of the computer department to be the team advisor. I didn't get a single yes, but I did have a few professors tell me I couldn't do it. I ended up going to the physics department instead. We never would have been able to do it without Ardupilot, so definitely a big thanks to the DIY Drones community.
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Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on June 20, 2012 at 12:29pm -
Yeah, in my second year, we dusted off the old Solar car which had done really really well 5 years prior. Unfortunately we had no budget, so we rented a Uhaul for transport, made virtually no changes to the car, and were running on whatever supply of tires we had left. Since the solar cells were getting old and inefficient, we stuck more batteries in the car. Well, the extra weight, combined with the old rubber, meant we kept getting blow-outs. We DNF'd when we ran out of tires. We were sleeping in the back of the Uhaul on cots, and all kinds of crap like that.
I tried to do Formula SAE, but we weren't even allowed to use school letterhead on the sponsorship request letters!
I'll never understand what their problem was. This is practically free advertising for them, and an awesome hands-on education for us.
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Comment by james sowell on June 21, 2012 at 12:17am -
chould you give us specs on the plane ? maybe we can find you some sponsers here uk drones just sent a lot stuff to a 13 year old, I might have some stuff laying around you chould have
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Comment by William Lemaire on June 21, 2012 at 5:20am
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Here are the main specs:
Motor: E-flight Power 90 1800W
Batteries: 2 x 6 cells Thunderpower 7800mah
ESC: Komtronik Jive
RC: Spektrum DX8
Payload: Custom Hardware and software, Canon t3i DSLR and Sony analog camera
Stabilisation: Infrared Thermopiles
GPS: Ublox 6
Modem: Digi Xtend
autopilot: Custom Hardware, Paparazzi software
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Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on June 21, 2012 at 5:56am -
Locking connectors on your FC, nice!
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