(above: crashes and near crashes at the competition) From the press reports: TOOWOOMBA man Simeon O'Neill and his best mate used their patched-up 30-year-old model plane to beat teams of university aerospace engineers at the UAV Challenge in Kingaroy. Mr O'Neill and his high school buddy Aaron Donaldson, from Geelong, won the main event, the Search and Rescue open category, taking home $5000. The Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) Outback Challenge was held at the Kingaroy Airport and finished yesterday. The pair heard about the competition last year and decided to rebuild Mr Donaldson's dad's 1978 model plane that was gathering dust in the shed. With a budget of about $6000, they were impressed with their winning efforts. "Everyone was aerospace engineers, Simeon and I didn't finish more than a semester of engineering," Mr Donaldson said. "QUT had a budget of about $30,000 and the United States university had a budget of about $25,000. And both university teams crashed their planes." The pair could have won the $50,000 prize. But they failed to complete the challenge after a wiring plug came loose and forced them to land. They will use the prize money to prepare another plane. "We're ready for next year now," Mr O'Neill said. See lots more videos in "related videos" here.
(above: crashes and near crashes at the competition) From the press reports: TOOWOOMBA man Simeon O'Neill and his best mate used their patched-up 30-year-old model plane to beat teams of university aerospace engineers at the UAV Challenge in Kingaroy. Mr O'Neill and his high school buddy Aaron Donaldson, from Geelong, won the main event, the Search and Rescue open category, taking home $5000. The Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) Outback Challenge was held at the Kingaroy Airport and finished yesterday. The pair heard about the competition last year and decided to rebuild Mr Donaldson's dad's 1978 model plane that was gathering dust in the shed. With a budget of about $6000, they were impressed with their winning efforts. "Everyone was aerospace engineers, Simeon and I didn't finish more than a semester of engineering," Mr Donaldson said. "QUT had a budget of about $30,000 and the United States university had a budget of about $25,000. And both university teams crashed their planes." The pair could have won the $50,000 prize. But they failed to complete the challenge after a wiring plug came loose and forced them to land. They will use the prize money to prepare another plane. "We're ready for next year now," Mr O'Neill said. See lots more videos in "related videos" here.
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
Comments
For our camera set-up we used a bullet camera and a 1 watt 2.4 GHz AV transmitter.
The UNAV 3500 comes with X-Bee (I think) radio modems but we purchased a pair of Digi 9Xtend radio modems so we would have greater range.
Even if you aren't competing it's a great event to watch and there are plenty of keen people to discuss UAV stuff with.
BOEING conducted two demonstration flights with their Scan Eagle UAV. The first time it's been demo'd in Australia to the public. They even showed live vision from the Scan Eagle onto the truck mounted super screen that they had there. Pretty interesting to see the recovery process too.
Awesome job!
What gear did you use for your radio links? (Camera & Modem)
I think I'll have to make the trip up there next year to check it all out!
Maybe that was a secret part of the competition (the signal lost)?
You guys though, no practice runs. i am impressed. Good man. Men. Whatever;). I wish i could hit Australia for the next comp. I need to read the rules.
In answer to why a radio uplink matters........
The organisers wanted, as part of the challenge, that the UAV was to be in contact with the ground station at all times. To do this it needed to receive a heart beat or pulse. The UNAV 3500 is designed to be flown out of RC range and return back to RC range for landing. We had the rules and developed a system that was simple and worked.... we proved that in the competition :)
Our safety system was the last step before the servos and was a timing circuit re-set by receiving a pulse. The pulse was sent from the groundstation and received by the radio modem onboard. This gave us an effective range of communication of more than 15 kms, well outside any standard RC range. Our UAV was launched on standard RC gear then switched into autonomous mode and flown out of RC range. The failsafe on the RC reveiver is set to default to AP mode so if it does go out of RC range then control is handed to the AP and it will fly to the next waypoint , or we can comand it to come home using the laptop. The safety system is the last step in the chain so that if RC signal and modem communication is lost then it will overide everything and enter failsafe mode. We lost power to the onboard modem, the pulse wasn't received to re-set the timer, and the UAV went into failsafe mode. You are right Condor and we could have had a failsafe that would return the UAV home but that's not what the rules were. If we lost modem comms then the failsafe could be waypoint 64 (Return home) and landed using the RC control.
Hope that explains a bit.
Cheers
Aaron
I still don't get why the planes all failed like that though. If they were autonomous, why would a radio uplink matter?
Link didn't work in the post above.
You can see our entry for the Documentary section of the Challenge here.
Aaron Donaldson here. One half of Team Telemasters.
for our documentary entered into the UAV Challenge.
Great competition and well worth all the effort to get there.
Our UAV is a 30 year old Senior Telemaster airframe converted to electric. My Dad built two of these when I was a year old and myself and Simeon resurrected them to use in the Challenge. I live in Geelong VIC and Simeon lives in Toowoomba QLD (About 1800 kms apart) Having two similar airframes meant we could both test the systems and we would have a spare frame for the comp.
Our plane flew perfectly during the test day (Tuesday) and completed the first fully autonomous circuit at the competition (in the two years it's been run). We are using a UNAV 3500FW and it performed perfectly. A big thanks to Mark at UNAV for his help and assistance in the AP setup. Nothing was too much trouble.
On the day of the competition (Wed) the QUT team suffered a crash during a flight demonstration to qualify to compete in the Search and Rescue Challenge. I spoke to members of the team afterwards and they believe (without fully studying it) the failure was due to power loss to their AP system causing a reset and loss of communication. Their system doesn't arm until satellites are acquired so a power loss means around a 30 second reboot. On viewing footage of the failure they didn't think that their failsafe had activated due to the position of the control surfaces not moving to the correct pre set positions. (all of this is just info gathered from talking with members of the team and may not be real cause anyway :)
Our aircraft was capable of completing the mission but due to operator error in the calibration process (our two team members live 1800 kms apart and have had no time to practice a full run and setup for the mission) and our standard operating procedures having not been set before the day. After attempting to start the mission the aircraft was seeking an incorrect altitude so we landed to check our systems. All seemed okay so we attempted again. On climb out we the aircraft went into failsafe mode and terminated the flight. Our safety system works on a heartbeat pulse being received by system onboard the aircraft and when it doesn't get the pulse, after 7 seconds the servos move to a pre set position and the throttle stops. Our UAV descended in a circling manner and landed on the airfield. The tail, prop and undercarriage were damaged and we couldn't repair it and reattempt in the time left available to us.
On removing the wing I noticed that the main flight batteries had shifted in flight and unplugged a power connector for the radio modem that is mounted in the wing. Having lost the power to the modem our safety system didn't receive the pulse and it went into failsafe mode overriding RC commands. Just as it was designed to do and just as the organisers wanted too.
The Missouri S&T team, also using a Senior Telemaster, suffered damage to their UAV due to pilot error on take off. A bit of bad luck for them after a lot of work. They had a great setup and would have made it into the search area for sure.
So all up two aircraft failed due to procedures and or operator error and the third was an equipment failure (yet TBC)
The search area is approx. 5 SQ Kms and is located 2.5 kms from the end of the Kingaroy Airfield.
www.uavoutbackchallenge.com.au for all the info on the challenge.
Oh and I wasn't really happy with the way the reporter quoted me too. She paraphrased a fair bit. It makes us sound like we are not that bright and gloating that the other teams were no good. Not the case at all. The other teams were both brilliant and all were great entries and great people. There was a camaraderie between the teams and plenty of ideas, tools, and advice were shared during the three days. I was devastated when I saw both the other teams suffer damage to their UAVs as I know how much work goes into them.
So as a wrap up we had a great time, learnt a lot, and will be back next year bigger and better.
Cheers
Aaron
Team Telemasters
One of the Airborne Delivery Challenge teams using a Paparazzi autopilot which requires a PPM receiver, went out for the test flight and was having so much glitching that they had almost no control, even from only a few feet away. . They switched to a PCM S receiver, which was okay, but this meant they couldn't use their autopilot. Even the people using Spektrum 2.4GHz RC radios were having severe problems, and there were so many different airframes that the cause would not have been airframe or equipment layout related...
For you interest, there is another UAV challenge in South Australia, called Genesis UAV Challenge for high schools, similar to the Airborne Delivery Challenge.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next