Ardupilot for the win! APM lead developer Andrew ("Tridge") Tridgell's CanberraUAV team with a 3D Robotics Pixhawk autopilot completed all the challenges and scored an impressive victory in this premier UAV competition.
Congratulations to Canberra UAV and indeed all the teams that found and rescued Joe. Everybody that qualified deserves a round of applause its a mission just to get to the venue and get your airframe through the strict requirements.
A bottle drop distance of 2.6m that's insane.
I personally believe the Outback Challenge has advanced unmanned aviation at a faster rate than any other competition and we should all be thankful for its existence.
If they get to keep Joe I hope there will be a series of road trip selfies. He has had quite a wait so I am sure ready to party it up a bit.
Comments
Truly an impressive accomplishment. Well done!
Great job Canberra guys, almost got it last year knocked it out of the park this year.
Be interesting to see what the next "Challenge" will be.
Best regards to you all,
Gary
Thanks everyone for your great feedback. We are taking a well deserved rest tonight and also celebrating the win. Tomorrow morning we head back to Canberra from Kingaroy. As Tridge mentioned conditions were not ideal, but the preparation we did including, countless test flights, simulations and many long nights working on the aircraft and systems paid off. Here is a ground shot of the bottle landed next to Joe, to put things in perspective, Our thanks to the event range officials for the photo. For each of the teams which successfully completed bottle drops during the event the contents were checked to ensure the required 500mls of water survived the drop.
Despite the years of effort going into our own entry, which Im sure many other teams did who got to participate this year as well, I think nobody deservered to win it more than CUAV! I must also give full kudos to Robota for coming in second with essentially just a good wifi FPV setup and to SFWA as well for their exceptional 2 man effort and "scratch built" autopilot and recog that finally ended Joe's thirst. Well done!
Congrats Tridge! Amazing achievement! I hope the world takes note of this accomplishment.
This is awesome.
My flab is totally aghast. Stunning work Tridge stunning.
It was a two stage parachute drop - primary release of the bottle so it hung beneath the plane, then secondary release of a cord attached to the top of the parachute two seconds later by a glider release servo. The two stage release makes for more consistent timing.
Before release we flew a butterfly pattern several times over Joe to get a good wind speed and direction estimate. The wind ended up being 14 knots. We then moved and rotated the drop mission to be into the wind, with a first servo release point of (70-wind*5) meters from the estimated Joe position. That simple formula came from empirical testing in the weeks leading up to the challenge. We dropped from 80 meters AGL, at an airspeed of 20m/s (normal cruise is 28m/s).
So in this case we did the initial servo drop release 35 meters from Joe, and the second servo fired 2 seconds later. You can see the bottle hanging beneath the plane in the photo below while waiting for the 2nd servo to fire, with Joe highlighted by our image recognition system on the ground.
Cheers, Tridge
Better not to even theorise about things like that, or we'll end up on yet another watch list :-)
There was either some ballistics calculation going on, factoring in airspeed & wind, or low altitude using LIDAR. He keeps his job for another year.
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