Unmanned aerial vehicles team takes second
A team of USU engineering students took second place at an international competition in June. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) team, comprised of team captain Daniel Morgan, Austin Jensen, Cal Coopmans, Christopher Hall, Di Long, Haiyang Chao, Mitchel Humpherys and Yiding Han, advised by Dr. YangQuan Chen. The team participated for the first time in the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) competition placing second with the second-highest score in the history of the event.
The AUVSI competition, an annual event, was held in Maryland and is open to college teams from anywhere in the world. Chen, associate professor in the USU department of electrical and computer engineering, said teams create “planes” which run on an autonomous system, similar to the auto-pilot of commercial airliners, and earn points by identifying and locating targets while flying over them. Mississippi State University’s team, a longtime competitor in the AUVSI competition, won first place.
For USU, winning second place, and establishing the second highest record at the event is no small feat. The USU-UAV team is relatively new, starting in August of 2007, captain Daniel Morgan said.
“I was expecting more,” Morgan said. “We actually ended up using our backup plane.”
The team’s primary plane, which Morgan said was not quite ready for competition, had to be substituted with another model leaving the team confident for the future.
“Next summer we will be number one,” Chen said. “We feel this is no surprise, we tried our best and we know that we are using an advanced platform.”
The team began while Morgan was working on a project over the summer with Dr. Chen. Morgan thought of implementing a different system than what they had been using, and it just went further and further, Morgan said. It didn’t take long for the project’s potential to show and after a “let’s go for it” from Chen, the team was assembled and after roughly a year of preparation they were able to bring home the $8,000 2nd-place prize in June’s competition.
“Once I got [to the event] I knew how good our product was,” Morgan said. “I was surprised.”
As for next year, Chen said he feels that their biggest focus will be on target recognition, stating that the team has “passed the hurdle” of the plane’s flight design. The unmanned vehicle’s system uses altitude sensors and gps to locate its targets. Points are also awarded to a team’s ability to locate an off-path target, as well as oral and written presentations of the team’s work. The USU-UAV team received an honorable mention in both the oral and journal categories and placed second in mission.
b.c.wood@aggiemail.usu.edu