AAE PhD students shine at the 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’23)

Led by Prof. Chih-yung WEN, Chair Professor of Aeronautical Engineering, and Head of the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, the research team comprising Ph.D. students Li-yu LO, Bailun JIANG, Wenyu YANG, and Kwai-wa TSE, won the first runner-up award at the 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’23) held on June 9, 2023, in Warsaw, Poland. This first runner-up award is competed at the simulation stage out of 39 competing teams from 20 countries/cities, including Canada, Greece, Czechia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United State, etc. Only the first five teams were invited proceeding to the final competition, viz. Spain, Canada, South Korea, India, and Hong Kong China. Sponsored by the world-leading IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and IEEE Control System Society, the UAV competition of ICUAS’23 is an international research student competition, collaboratively hosted by Lazarski University, Warsaw, Poland, the University of Zagreb Croatia, the Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) and the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems Association, Inc. (ICUAS). This UAV competition offers opportunities for research students to test and compare their skills with those of their peers worldwide.

The challenges of ICUAS’23 UAV competition in the aerial domain address the problem of precisely estimating the drone position and orientation using only an onboard camera, and the problem of finding AI methods to detect where a defect is in an aerial image stream. In addition, the task benchmark includes the component of online inspection in the competition arena with various objects and obstacles of unknown layouts. The UAV will need to navigate several waypoints inside the GPS-denial arena and report detections of the cracks in the arena. Participants were required to write codes and deploy their solutions in person during the competition day, as the drone hardware, flight settings, and arena were unknown beforehand.

ICUAS is a global event that offers opportunities to collaborate, interact and shape the future of unmanned aviation systems. For more information, please visit https://www.uasconferences.com/.