It's going on now through the weekend in Lexington Park, Maryland. The website is pretty uninformative, with no list of teams entering. Anybody know more or is there and can share some reports?
I would like to say what a great time I had there. I was the safety judge for both days of flying. Seeing the young men and women come out to show off their skills was truly inspiring. I hope to see all of them, plus new teams, next year compete. While there were COTS and homebrew GCS there I was amazed to see how many teams used the HappyKillmore GCS. I asked of the teams that I judged that used it to let the author know and perhaps make a donation or send a team shirt. Congratulations to all the competitors.
Not sure if any of you were watching, but Bucknell flew earlier today. We were forced to take a timeout on Friday because a team ahead of us took one, and we weren't ready yet.
The short version is we crashed, unfortunately. We attempted the auto takeoff twice. The first ended in a minor nose-in crash. The second resulted in our prop slicing through our ESC wires. Apparently it was still loose after the first crash. After some quick soldering, we attempted a manual takeoff with the goal of flying to a waypoint or two since that's all we had time left for. That failed too with a really bad nosedive, right onto the runway. Most parts look okay, but I'm going to have to thoroughly test the autopilot and everything else for salvaging (the URSUS we christened the "Flying Bison" is going to need a major overhaul to ever fly again). The GPS still didn't have a lock after 5 minutes before the manual takeoff, so there could be a problem there.
At the end I must say it was an amazing experience. We had the smallest team there by far (just two people), but we gave it our best and learned a lot in the process. A few other teams were flying Ardupilots as well, and according to teams that have been at the competition before, there were far more this year than ever in the past. I'll make a more detailed blog post in the coming week, after I get our build log and photos up online.
I'm sitting at the airfield right now, I'm here with Bucknell University. We're flying an ArduPilot Mega and going fourth tomorrow for the flight demonstration. We're planning an autonomous takeoff and landing using a modified URSUS airframe. I'll let you know how it goes.
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The short version is we crashed, unfortunately. We attempted the auto takeoff twice. The first ended in a minor nose-in crash. The second resulted in our prop slicing through our ESC wires. Apparently it was still loose after the first crash. After some quick soldering, we attempted a manual takeoff with the goal of flying to a waypoint or two since that's all we had time left for. That failed too with a really bad nosedive, right onto the runway. Most parts look okay, but I'm going to have to thoroughly test the autopilot and everything else for salvaging (the URSUS we christened the "Flying Bison" is going to need a major overhaul to ever fly again). The GPS still didn't have a lock after 5 minutes before the manual takeoff, so there could be a problem there.
At the end I must say it was an amazing experience. We had the smallest team there by far (just two people), but we gave it our best and learned a lot in the process. A few other teams were flying Ardupilots as well, and according to teams that have been at the competition before, there were far more this year than ever in the past. I'll make a more detailed blog post in the coming week, after I get our build log and photos up online.
Hopefully this does not murder the stream