Hi All,
Our first competition flight happend today. I was scheduled for 8:30am so we woke up bright and early for setup. It ended up getting pushed back to ~9:15am. This allowed for a great photo-op.
When the flight actually happened Jorge manned autopilot while Dylan monitored imaging. Our autopilot was preprogrammed so apart from initiallizing the search area routine, these two folks made sure the plane was operating properly.
Rijesh and Dat spent there time on the runway chilling. Rijesh only has to fly the plane for landing and takeoff. The rest of the time Dat and him were playing spot the moving spec in the sky. Visual contact at the range is made by competition observers to ensure that the UAV stays within bounds. The UAV flew ~1.9km from the ground control station.
The flight went swimingly. Our actual flight path is shown below and can be contrasted with the simulated one from yesterday.
We’ve made a few tweaks to the autopilot based on data we got back from the flight. These changes have been implemented for tommorrow’s final competition flight.
Imaging preformed okay. We seem to have been a little out of focus and were experiencing the occasional motion blur. We did manage to cover the entire search area and have some sort of image for each crop target.
We have another flight tommorrow at 8am.
Finally here is a picture of Brian.
