Two design teams mentored by Dr. Eric Johnson took home top awards for their work at the 2015 Vertical Take-off and Lift (VTOL) Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) Student Challenge.
The third annual competition was a part of the American Helicopter Society's Forum 71, which was held in Virginia Beach, VA, May 4-7.
In two separate competitions, the GT-AE team bested designs from six other schools, taking home the first place awards in the manually piloted and autonomous flight categories.
"The autonomous win was especially significant as Georgia Tech was the first team to successfully complete the autonomous mission in the history of the competition," said GT-AE professor Dr. Marilyn Smith, who was formally acknowledged as an AHS Technical Fellow during the four-day AHS conference.
Participating in the design, construction and and deployment of the vehicle were GT-AE studentsDaniel Magree, Stephen Haviland, Dmitry Bershadsky, Takuma Nakamura, Ben Kawecki,and Niharika Arora.
Check out this video of their work.
"On every transition from manual to auto it was very clean and the vehicle itself flew great, " said Johnson, GT-AE's Lockheed Martin Associate Professor of Avionics Integration.
"For the manual team, we were able to complete several very fast missions in a span of a few minutes. Judges were impressed with the vehicle as well as other design aspects, like IMU vibration isolation, flight time, vehicle speed, and camera mounting - they angled it down for better target view."
The submission for in the autonomous category won a $5,000 prize while the manually maneuvered UAV won $2,500.
AHS evaluators were particularly impressed with the submission in the autonomous category, writing:
"This was an extremely challenging accomplishment, with the vertical takeoff and landing MAV required to fly from a take-off point and then locate a target completely autonomously, hover over the target, and then return to its origin without human guidance. The target, approximately 75 ft (23 m) away, was randomly moved just after liftoff by the MAV. The electric-powered MAVs were limited to 500 grams (1.1 lb), including batteries."