Today was the registration and practice day for competition. We got to talk to some of the other teams for a little while and unload all of our gear before we had our big safety/orientation meeting. There are some really neat organizations here, it was nice to be able to socialize with them for a bit before things get really crazy the next few days.
Overall the team is having a really good time, though we have had a few major setbacks. Brandon was supposed to fly in tonight from California to perform any manual piloting we need during competition but he informed us at about 2:00 that he was no longer coming. Fortunately, the pilot from University of Waterloo’s team agreed to pilot our aircraft tomorrow. We are not really sure how well this arrangement will work out but we are all hoping for the best.
We also ran into a problem with us using outdated software for our autopilot system. The older version has worked properly for us up until now but we recently discovered that we need the new version to properly send telemetry data from our groundstation computer to our vision processing computer. We attempted to obtain the updated version of the code but it is no longer openly available. Apparently the US Department of State has determined that the Piccolo system and all of the associated software are now protected under ITAR. This means that we cannot get the software without providing compliance documentation to the company. We are unable to jump through the hoops necessary to accomplish this within a week’s time let alone a day’s time so we will have to do without the updated software. This is very likely to affect our ability to complete stage 2 of the competition but we can at least show off our symbol identification capabilities.
On the more positive side of things today, we got to see Georgia Tech’s huge autonomous helicopter do some test flights. While I don’t know the exact specs on it, I’ve been told by many people at the competition that it costs something near $1.2 million. It was certainly an impressive thing to see in action. We don’t know all of the details of what it does to accomplish the mission goals but it seems that they have it dangle a spear-like device which they try to swing into the window to deploy a rover into the building. Check out some of the pictures below to see what it looks like. We are all looking forward to seeing it in action again tomorrow. Enjoy the pictures, more should be coming over the next few days.
Our main aircraft posing for a photo
Target symbol on one of the buildings
Georgia Tech's chopper during preflight checks
Georgia Tech's chopper taking off
Georgia Tech's chopper with the rover spear
The rover spear being dangled into position