A banquet was held on Friday evening to thank all of the sponsors and people who helped make the event a reality as well as to recognize the achievements of the competitors. While we didn’t win any awards, we received $1,200 in prize money for our performance. This will be used to cover the cost of entering into the competition next year.
The team was disappointed that we weren’t able to demonstrate everything our system was capable of due to our repeated engine failures. We still had a great time at the event and we gained a lot of valuable experience from it. The team seems to be stronger than ever and we are all incredibly excited about next year’s event.
Speaking of next year’s event, an overview of the challenge was presented at the conclusion of the banquet. It is now confirmed that the event will be greatly scaled down to an indoor competition as was hinted at last year. We will have to develop a completely new platform since none of our air vehicles are suitable for indoor flight. The challenge will be to autonomously navigate an aerial vehicle through the inside of a building and have it identify and maintain focus on a particular target. The details of the rules have not been released yet but that is the basic overview of the task.
It looks like our next big project is going to be trying to secure funding to buy parts for a new system. The last few years have been relatively inexpensive for us as a club because we already had most of the expensive parts that we needed from previous years. Now that we have to scale down drastically, none of our existing electronics or airframes are suitable. If anyone has sponsorship leads for us, please let me know.
With that said, I just want to thank everyone that helped support us this season. Things might not have turned out exactly as we were hoping, but we still had a great year and learned a lot. We have learned from our mistakes and grown as a team. This coming year will be the best one yet!