Day 2 of our competition.
We arrived safely last night/this morning at 1:00am. The ride was filled with coding, learning and all-around competition preparation. As per our previous blog post, you may be aware that we had a few issues with our airframe, specifically the part when we decided to take it for a dip. Some quick executive decisions were made to purchase replacement parts and our entire lab was brought along with us to Manitoba. So at 1:00am there we were setting up our lab in one of the rooms. Exhibit A.
Busy away. Slowly one by one we fell and gave in to sleep. The majority of Team UAARG getting less than an hour of sleep. Going to bed a 6:00 and waking up at 7:00. Later this morning, the one time you can say that, we got up and presented our project proposal. At this competition, we are “contracted” to perform aerial surveillance, georeference targets, and calculate areas. We each spoke a bit about our respective fields with Cindy giving a general idea of why they should choose us as opposed to our competition. Following that we finished our final rewiring. At this point we were in a state where we could successfully capture images and tag them with telemetry data. The competition has a Flight Readiness Review(FRR). Basically a test we have to pass that ensures we have proper safety features present. At this point we should theoretically have passed the FRR but would have done so in a very round about way. Instead we decided to perform additional modifications to take the system to the very same level as the pre-crash plane. And that is just what we did. The first time the judges came to see our test we asked them to give us an extension, which they graciously gave. The second time the judges came by we thought we had everything configured correctly, but missed a requirement. Finally a third time we went out and passed the test with flying colours. Just on the nick of time as well. We performed a quick range test and noticed we were not receiving the same poor reception. It seems like our crash was caused by the metal cowl we had installed on the previous plane.
All in all though of the 11 teams only 2 teams actually flew today. UAARG did not manage to take our plane up for a test flight, but we were capable to do so. Alas we readied our plane 15 minutes too late.
From two days ago we had a drenched box full of electronics and now we have rebuilt the plane.
“The big job was coming together as team, and you guys did that” – Joseph Patton
Of the two teams that actually flew today, one was Team Murphy. Their flight was welcomed with applause. It was very heavy winds and basic flight control was very difficult. Thankfully they made it down in one piece. Murphy retrieved some very good images from this flight and look very prepared for the official competition. They also received two standing ovations for Rijesh’s piloting, mostly because there were no seats. But still a standing ovation.