A team from the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering took home the first-runner up prize in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Competition at the 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’23) held in Warsaw, Poland.

Led by Prof. Chih-yung Wen, Chair Professor of Aeronautical Engineering and Head of the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, the team, comprising members Li-yu Lo, Bailun Jiang, Wenyu Yang and Kwai-wa Tse, competed against 38 other teams from 20 regions.

The competing teams were required to deploy an UAV that was able to navigate several waypoints inside the GPS-denial arena and report detections of cracks in the arena by addressing the problem of precisely estimating the drone position and orientation using only an onboard camera, and finding AI methods to detect where a defect was located in an aerial image stream.

After the qualifier was held in a simulated environment, the top five teams - from Canada, Hong Kong, India, South Korea and Spain - entered the final competition. Participants were required to write code and deploy their solutions on the spot without prior knowledge of the drone hardware, flight settings or arena.

ICUAS’23 UAV is an international competition for research students, co-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).

The ICUAS’23 UAV competition offered the students an opportunity to test and compare their skills with their peers from around the world.