Missouri S&T aerial robotic team to race drones

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Near the end of July, a team of students from Missouri University of Science and Technology will compete in an intercollegiate aerial robotics event that some have described as a complex chess match for drones. The drones are designed and built by students, including their custom electronics.
The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) will take place July 25-27 at Georgia Institute of Technology. This will be Missouri S&T’s first entry into the competitive scene of flying robots. At this year’s event, Missouri S&T’s Multirotor Robot Design Team will use an autonomous aerial robot named “Sentinel” to guide ground-based robots to a specific side of a playing field. The drones must navigate autonomously through an unknown terrain and obstacles, and locate other robots.
Each year, the IARC develops a new challenge that is considered “impossible to complete” by any devices currently owned by government or industry. In last year’s competition, robots had to locate an opening in a building, enter without being detected on a surveillance camera, navigate crowded hallways and reach a particular room without bumping any walls or landing. From there, the robot had to locate a particular paper inbox containing a flash drive, retrieve the flash drive, replace it with an identical blank flash drive and exit the building – all within a short time span.
Sentinel is the first aircraft the team has designed specifically for the IARC. It includes on-board electronics such as a flight control board that allows it to navigate without direct human control, an obstacle-avoiding LIDAR system, and a camera and image processing system. The drone will use the camera, combined with computer software, to identify and target the ground robots that are a part of this year’s competition. Sentinel is made of a carbon fiber base plate and uses lightweight metals to connect its parts for ...

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