Today was very intense and eventful day. We had a few issues pop up but the day was definitely somewhat successful. If anything we are simply fortunate that we did not suffer the fate that a few other teams did. Two helicopters crashed today along with a small aircraft that the team from India brought. There was also a really close call where one university’s helicopter started plummeting towards the ground while it was directly above the area where all the teams are set up. Everyone made a mad dash for cover but it turned out to be unnecessary because the pilot managed to recover the vehicle about 30 feet above the ground.
Our team got off to a rough start today but things are definitely looking up for us now. Something was wrong with the receiver we use to run the emergency kill system on our plane and it was causing it to kill the engine when we didn’t tell it to. South Dakota School of Mines was nice enough to lend us a receiver to use in its place and we were able to fly during our last attempt for the day. We were able to make an autonomous pass over the town while running our vision software but the pass didn’t seem to be lined up quite right and we don’t think we even got an image of the symbol in any of our frames. We are going to review the frame dumps tonight and see how we need to modify the pass for tomorrow so that we can get a good view of the symbol. We are very confident that our software will successfully identify the symbol as long as we can manage to get it into view of the plane autonomously. We should be in pretty good shape for tomorrow as long as the humidity doesn’t manage to kill us.
Pictures from Day 2 will be coming soon.