RoboticsTeams compete in challenging robotic helicopter competition
A U Michigan student team took part in an autonomous aerial vehicle competition. Their task: build a 3-pound flying machine that can, under its own control, take off, fly through a window into a model building, avoid security lasers, navigate the halls, recognize signs, enter the correct room, find a flash drive in a box on a desk, pick it up, leave a decoy, exit, and land in under ten minutes. Beyond military uses, autonomous vehicle they built could one day be used to survey collapsed buildings or inspect hard-to-get-to parts of bridges and other infrastructure. An offshoot group from a previous U-M team is working to commercialize the U-M technology through a startup called SkySpecs, which inspects windmills.
Simulated building interior for use in competition // Source: bu.edu
If the mission sounds impossible, this is because it is — at least with today’s technology: Build a 3-pound flying machine that can, under its own control, take off, fly through a window into a model building, avoid security lasers, navigate the halls, recognize signs, enter the correct room, find a flash drive in a box on a desk, pick it up, leave a decoy, exit, and land in under ten minutes.
This is the charge of the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) — a contest which is in its twenty-second year, but only its sixth mission (this year’s competition, held last week simultaneously in the United States and China, was called Mission Six). It tends to take a few years for a team to build a craft that can accomplish it, and the Mission Six challenge was proposed in 2010.
Gizmag reports that the Mission Six scenario is that an enemy schemes to gain control over the Eurasian banking system, a scheme which, if successful, would throw the world’s economy into chaos. This plan is contained in a USB flash drive located in a remote security office of the enemy’s intelligence organization.
The target building has a broken window on the same floor as the security office. This building measures roughly 15 x 30 meters, and is equipped with laser intrusion detectors, floor sensors, video surveillance, and periodic patrols. Mission Six calls for the autonomous aerial vehicle covertly to capture the flash drive, and replace it with another of the same make to postpone discovery of the theft.
A University of Michigan release reports that in 2012, U-M’s group came closest of the twenty-one participating teams. This year the students who are members of the Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicle team said they were poised to succeed.
“We’ve had a year to work on retrieval. We’ve had a year to work on dropping a decoy. We’ve had a year to further tighten everything and adjust the tolerances,” said Jonathan Bendes, leader of the team and a senior computer science major.
“The pieces that weren’t in place before are now,” said Jonathan Kurzer, a senior in electrical engineering who leads the circuits division. “And we know we can move on to the next task, which is winning.”
The team’s entry is a quadrotor — a helicopter with four propellers — which the students assembled and programmed nearly from scratch. Its carbon fiber body carries two
