A team of students from the Technion won fifth place in an international competition for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles

A team of students from the Technion won fifth place (out of 48 teams) in the prestigious competition of the International Association for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (AUVSI), which was held in June in Maryland, USA.

A team of students from the Technion won fifth place (out of 48 teams) in the prestigious competition of the International Association for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (AUVSI or in Hebrew as UAVs), which was held in June in Maryland, USA.

The Technion team, which included students from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering and the Faculty of Computer Science, developed an airborne system that performs observation, target identification, communication transmission and dropping payloads on the target - all this in a fully autonomous aircraft. The two aircraft developed by the students are equipped with many advanced systems: a stabilized camera, an airborne computer for image processing and a communication system for controlling, controlling and transmitting images. The ground station includes a control system for monitoring the autonomous flight, collecting images and processing them, and a communication system for command, control and transmission of the images.

In the first part of the competition, after the safety approval phase, the students presented to the jury the readiness of the system for flight (Flight Readiness Review. Of the 48 teams that started the competition, only 29 reached the final stage: the flight line. The two planes of the Technion team successfully passed all the tests .

On the flight line, the teams were given 20 minutes to prepare the system, including the ground station. The project leader, Dror Artzi, said that "for thirty minutes we carried out the tasks we had undertaken - autonomous flight through defined points, photo recognition, dropping an egg from a height of 350 feet into a target circle with a radius of 50 feet, and more. The judges were very enthusiastic about performing the egg-throwing exercise."

During the nine months leading up to the competition, the students experienced developing an overall system, manufacturing aircraft, performing complex analyzes and experiments, operating the entire system within coordinated team work (CRM) and performing an operational deployment. "We received assistance and support from several companies and organizations," says Artzi, "including Israel Defense magazine, the Rafael Company, the Aerospace Industry, the Program for Autonomous Systems at the Technion, the Laboratory for Geometric Processing of Images in Computer Science at the Technion, Elbit Systems and the VectorNav company. The team demonstrated in the competition the high academic level of the Technion graduates for the future, and once again presented Israel's capabilities in the development of integrated systems and unmanned aircraft.

The project will be presented at the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering in a special evening that will be held to mark the event and at the UVID 2014 conference, which will be held on September 17, 2014 at the Avenue Halls in Kiryat Airport.