Aerial Robotics Club Receives Top Honors in Student UAV Competition
August 29 , 2005
By Dan Edwards, NCSU

The Aerial Robotics Club at N C State University placed 3rd in the world in the third annual Student UAV Competition hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). Additional honors include:

• 1st place Technical Paper
• 1st place Oral Presentation
• 1st place (tie) Safety Award

Needless to say, the judges and spectators were extremely impressed.

2005 NCSU Aerial Robotics Club

The Aerial Robotics Club flies a modified Senior Telemaster airframe, essentially a large trainer aircraft, carrying 8 pounds of payload for over 40 minutes of flight duration. A Micropilot 2028g commercial-off-the-shelf autopilot guides the aircraft though a series of GPS waypoints after a manual takeoff. Then, custom NCSU software controls a gimbled pan-tilt mount and overlays a GPS grid on the live video stream. This grid scales and rotates with aircraft orientation and includes various target tracking modes. Users can get target latitude and longitudes by adding a virtual target marker: a list of target coordinates is dynamically updated on the screen. Additionally, a high-resolution camera takes still photos during the flight. These systems combined in a new 6' x 12' ground station trailer earned the Aerial Robotics Club 3rd place in the world. NC State has raised the bar for competition in 2006!

The club is comprised of and run by mostly undergraduates in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Computer Science (CS) and is always looking for new members. Competition team members include Jonathan Brandmeyer (MAE), Ron Burnette (MAE), Dave Burke (ECE), Dan Edwards (MAE), Matt Hazard (MAE), Cheryl Marek (MAE), Adam Propst (MAE), CJ Soques (ECE), and Alan Stewart (MAE).

The 2005-2006 year holds an incredibly exciting future for the club and promises to be a very productive year! The club members are looking forward to the upcoming year with enthusiasm.

If you are interested in becoming a member or sponsoring the NCSU Aerial Robotics Club, please visit http://www.ncsu.edu/stud_orgs/ar .