The students won first place in two categories, and fourth place in the overall ranking
A team of students from the Technion won fourth place in the world's most important student competition for autonomous aircraft: AUVSI. The competition, held in Maryland, was attended by universities from all over the world (most of them from the USA), including a team from the Technion, which is participating in the competition for the third time.
The students - a joint team from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering and the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion - developed during the school year an original, unmanned aircraft capable of taking off, flying, performing aerial reconnaissance, avoiding obstacles, identifying and deciphering targets and dropping a payload to a given point on the ground. Some of the tasks must be carried out autonomously, that is, with independent "decision-making" by the aircraft and without assistance from the ground.
Teams from 46 universities from all over the world entered the competition, but only about half of them (24 teams) succeeded in the preliminary challenges and reached the flight stage. As mentioned, the Technion team won fourth place in the overall score, based on the weighting of its achievements during the competition: first place in the level of the engineering report summarizing the development (25% of the total score), first place in the presentation of the "flight readiness survey" (25%) and fifth place in the flight tasks of the system.
The project was directed by Dror Artzi from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering together with Amit Aids from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering after Viterbi and Yevgeni Gutnik from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering, with the assistance of Yohanan Erez and supervisors from the laboratories at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. According to Artzi, "In the language of the industry, it's called a UAV - an unmanned aerial vehicle - but in this competition it's about civil systems for all intents and purposes. Since this is a very complex project, which combines many disciplines - aerodynamics, structure, propulsion, control and control, communication, computing and image processing - we decided to combine students from both faculties in the group."
The delegation received support from the management of the Technion and various units at the Technion - the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering (mainly the VISL Vision and Image Science Laboratory and the faculty's Communication Laboratory), the Autonomous Systems Unit and a host of other entities: Rafael, the Aerospace Industry, Elbit, DHL, Intel, VECTORNAV, INTELLITECH , PGRC and OTENTIK.
Artzi, a private pilot who graduated from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering at the Technion, worked in the aerospace industry for 21 years. According to him, "From my experience in the industry, I know that it is not enough to be a good engineer - you must know how to 'sell' your developments. This is what I tell my students: that they must correctly present the idea, the research and the solution, otherwise even if they are brilliant engineers, no one will know it."
