The prop planes and two-seaters that usually fill the skies of St. Mary’s Regional Airport were temporarily grounded June 26 because of a steady humming sound.
But fear not, the sound was that of drones taking part in the 22nd International RoboNation and NAWCAD Student Unmanned Competition, which attracted 33 college and high school teams from around the country and the world.
“What the students are doing in programming can apply to all different domains, and so the idea is to have a place where students can take the content and skills of what they’re learning in the classroom and apply it to something they can do in the real world,” RoboNation Inc. Vice President of Programs Lindsey Groark said on the tarmac. “It’s a systems engineering approach where they can build something tangible, they can design it, they can deploy it.”
Teams built their drones from scratch and in a mission-based competition had to fly them through a wooded area before delivering four water bottles to a grid on the runway near a mannequin named Randy, who was lying prone with a boogie board.
“It used to be that drones were only for the military. But now there’s so many commercial applications: delivery, search and rescue,” said UAS Mission System Branch Head Andy Pontzer, who added the military has been using drones since at least the 1980s. “All of that has really expanded the envelope for where we can use drones, and we need people who are skilled and who can operate them.”
Teams had 30 minutes along with other constraints such as how far and how high they could fly, and received grid coordinates moments before takeoff.
“The competition is to foster the up-and-coming generation of college students and even high school students to get involved into unmanned aircraft systems,” Pontzer said. “It’s the processing and the imagery and just the shrinking down of all the electronics. The stuff you can do onboard now you couldn’t even do in a huge building full of computers, so it’s enabling missions we never thought were possible before.”
King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia took first place while runner-up went to Turkey’s Istanbul Technical University. Institute of Technology’s Nirma University (India), Ramaiah Institute of Technology (India) and Istanbul University (Turkey) placed third through fifth, respectively.
Ramaiah also won Best in Technical Design.
“We wanted something to challenge ourselves in order to think creatively and make a design that would truly compete on an international scale,” said South Carolina-based Bishop England High School senior Griffin Buss, whose team used a parachute line drop system and finished with a score of 20.6%.
“I am very pleased,” Bishop England High School Advisor Katie Buss said of her team. “Really the intent of this was to expose them to something new; innovation, creativity [to] get their minds thinking differently [using] applied learning instead of just learning in the classroom or playing video games.”
The Dawn Jaeger Tenacity Award was awarded to Montreal’s McGill University, the Dr. Arthur Reyes Safety Award went to Italy’s Sapienza University and the JustJoe Sportsmanship Award went to Amador Valley High School in California. Cornell University was presented with the Most Innovative Award.
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