Months after achieving autonomous flight capabilities, the Radio Control Club hit its next major milestone after finishing 39th in the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems competition held by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI – SUAS) in Maryland, USA. The competition, held from June 14th to June 17th, attracted participation from 59 international teams including teams from IIT Bombay, DTU and IIIT Delhi.

The aim of the competition was to build a mission surveillance drone for the US Military and participating teams were judged on several capabilities. The first round was a technical design paper presentation explaining all the structural and functional components of the flight. The second round, the Flight Readiness Review (FRR), used to be a presentation at the competition venue until last year. This year required participants to upload a video demonstrating flight readiness. The third and final round was a mission demonstration at the venue in Maryland which included various subtasks which the aircraft had to carry out autonomously. The tasks included autonomous flight, obstacle avoidance, object detection and image processing, air delivery, and interoperability. The RC Club came in at rank 33 for the technical design paper and rank 35 for the FRR, bagging a rank of 39 overall.

“We decided to build an aeroplane rather than a quadcopter as planes requires less power. They’re easier to build but much more difficult to control,” said Mandar Khapekar, Team AeroBITS’s ex-Team leader recalling the effort they put in to the competition. He was quick to thank Prof. Manoj Soni who mentored the team during their preparations.

“Sponsorship was an issue. We did not get any sort of sponsorship from the institute and so had to pay for the expenses ourselves. The registration fee by itself came to about $1000 so the total cost was around 2.5 lakh rupees,” said Mandar, who is hopeful of his juniors getting sponsored owing to the team’s recent success, especially since they were participating against teams with much higher budgets. “We can’t blame anyone for our lack of sponsorship. We were first time participants. I hope our performance this year gets us sponsors next time around”. Team AeroBITS will participate in the competition again in 2019.