The overall goals for this competition were to fly low, fast, and controlled. As such the team focused heavily on understanding and tuning our system and autopilot. For more information refer to the Autonomous Vehicle Competition 2010 rules.
Aerial Robotics Club SparkFun AVC 2010 Team
Before the competition began, the team decided to do some quick tests to establish consistent takeoffs and landings. The takeoff loop required additional waypoints to guarantee that the aircraft was correctly lined up to cross the starting line. After doing a few landing approaches, the initial landing waypoint was moved further away from the touch down point. The desired touch down location was also adjusted to account for weather conditions as well as parking lot obstacles.
Round 1
With the Paparazzi flashed and the GPS initialized to the runway, it was time for our first attempt. A flick of a switch and a quick toss had the aircraft lining up for its first loop. While watching the plane in the air the turns looked a tad sloppy, but the ground station revealed that the plane was actually tracking its path nicely. After flying the complete loop without crossing the walls of the building the autopilot entered its landing procedures. Typically the autopilot drops enough altitude to make a brief half circle path before making its final approach. This time however, the Paparazzi decided to go around a second loop to drop more altitude. At this point the autopilot was terrifyingly close to crashing into the roof of neighboring building. After this near death pass, the autopilot came in for a final landing just shy of the designate box. While the landing was outside of the box, it was extremely impressive to see the plane lightly coast in between the building, crowd, light poles, and other objects.
Results from the first round. Note that this time includes the 15 second reduction for an autonomous landing.
Round 2
After a successful first run, modifications were made to the flight plan in an attempt to fly under the balloons and land inside the designated area. All of the waypoints for the competition loop were lowered a considerable amount and the initial landing waypoint was adjusted from round one observations.
The bulk of the flight was very similar to round one but without the near death landing approach. On top of this, the aircraft landed not only inside the box, but on top of the checkered starting line! This subtracted 30 seconds from our loop.
Results from the second attempt.
One of the other competitors had an extremely impressive flying wing system that flew a clean loop and nailed an autonomous landing. This placed him at 4 seconds.
Round 3
For our last attempt the competition waypoints were dropped by another ridiculous amount to attempt to fly underneath the balloons. This resulted in the plane just barely skimming the tops of the balloons which didn’t qualify for the 15 second reduction. Later on we would learn that waypoints set to around 11 meters above the runway would get the plane underneath the balloons (but also ram it into a tree). The aircraft came in a tad high for the autolanding and ended up hitting the SparkFun scoreboard and bouncing out of the box. As such this run actually ended up being slower than our second attempt.
Results
The team was awarded 3rd place in the aerial division and also received the Engineer’s Choice award. Ultimately, we all had a blast and learned a tremendous amount preparing for and participating in the competition. Thanks for hosting such an enjoyable event SparkFun!
Starting a round. Thanks SparkFun!