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Joseph Flaig
The excited chatter stopped as the whir of rotors filled the air. All attention was on the white fixed-wing drone as it started to gather speed on the grass. Then, suddenly, it swung upwards into the blustery air.
The crowd clapped and cheered, celebrating a successful flight for the King Fahd University team just before the 3pm cut-off, after technical issues had prevented multiple attempts throughout the day. The flight didn’t last long – about eight seconds – but that didn’t matter. It was a victory for the supportive and collaborative atmosphere at the 2023 UAS Challenge, and yet another successful flight at the June event.
More teams managed to fly than ever before at this year’s edition of the IMechE event, thanks in part to an increased focus on reliability and airworthiness from the organisers. An end to Covid disruption and maturing knowledge amongst the 19 participating teams – which included students from any stage of their degree for the first time, rather than just master’s students – also helped.
“It’s really positive,” said event chair Paul Lloyd. “We’ve had the best ever turnout that we’ve had in the nine years we’ve been going, and importantly this time around the teams are pretty ready from the get go… We even got some competition flying done in the first afternoon, which has never happened before.”
A wide variety of autonomous-capable designs were seen flying over the BMFA Buckminster airfield in rural Leicestershire, from a helicopter-style design from UCL to quadcopters and fixed-wings. Several teams opted to combine features of both, enabling vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and winged flight. Third-place Loughborough went one step further with the first successful tilt-rotor configuration, using the same three motors for take-off, horizontal flight and landing.
“If you’ve got a 3x3m patch of terrain, this thing can take off and it can land. We don’t need a runway,” said team leader Alessandro Corrias. “The main thing is the speed of a fixed-wing aircraft, but it’s also the efficiency. Once we tilt those motors forwards and we start depending on the wings to lift, this aircraft can go on for kilometres and kilometres. We just completed an eight-and-a-half kilometre course today, and we landed with 38% of the battery left. We could have gone for even longer.”
Achieving such a feat in autonomous flight was “hugely complex”, said Lloyd. “There’s not many commercial designs that will do that yet.”
Another technical revelation was a new mechanism for dropping the simulated humanitarian payload, from overall winners Istanbul Technical University. The mechanism used short loops of nichrome wire around straps on the payload, secured by fishing line. When the nichrome wire had a current passed through it, it heated up and melted the fishing line, dropping the payload.
Almost half of the teams were from international universities, including the all-female King Fahd team from Saudi Arabia, the first in the competition. The team’s drone had taken off once before the last-minute flight, but a problem with the power system caused a crash, requiring extensive repairs to the nose and tail. Members worked for 12 hours straight with the event’s repair team, said team captain Najla Alkhathlan, and their efforts were rewarded with the successful flight.
The applause and cheers from other teams, scrutineers and judges was a sign of the supportive atmosphere at the event.
“There’s a real community feel, all the teams are supporting each other,” said Jo Horton, IMechE director of member operations. “And we have some fantastic volunteers here. We couldn’t do it without these volunteers, their skillsets and that what they’re giving back.”
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