Kuentaek Lee Team Icarus

With a little less than two months to go before they vie for a $1 million grand prize in the Drone Racing League's Alpha Pilot Competition, members of Georgia Tech's Team Icarus are taking time out to test the code they will use to control an actual drone in the final match-up.

Team Icarus is one of just nine teams worldwide that made it to the finals of the DRL competition.

From July 16 to July 19, several members of Icarus traveled to Cambridge Massachusetts where they attended a Developer's Summit, sponsored by Lockheed Martin, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Team member Keuntaek Lee, a doctoral student working with Prof.Evangelos Theodorou, said the four-day event gave all of the competitors a chance to integrate their algorithims into working drones.

"The drone they gave us to test it with had problems, but that didn't stop us. We got a lot of good data from the Summit that we're going to analyze now that we're back at Tech," he said.

To test their work, Lee and all of his competitors must don a virtual reality headset that allows them to view a depiction of how well their algorithims are predicting the actual flight performance of their drone.

That simulation is as close as Icarus will get to the real thing before September, when the team will fly to an as-yet unannounced location to install their AI technologies into drones that no one has yet seen or handled. Then, instead of using virtual reality headgear to watch their technology perform, all nine Alpha Pilot competitors will have to stand back and watch as those drones take orders from the technology they've worked months to perfect.