Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team

To see more pictures of our UAV you can visit our flickr site. We will be updating our the flickr site frequently with new pictures of our progress.

We have also just recently purchased the autopilot, which should be coming in within the next week or so. After extensive searching and comparisons of various autopilot solutions, the autopilot we decided to go with is the Kestrel by Procerus Technologies. It is quite the feature packed autopilot and should allow us to get the plane up and flying autonomously rather quickly. And we are still in the process of determining what we will use for our video link back to the ground station, the biggest issue is the range, whatever we decide to use must be able to achieve a maximum range of seven miles (line of sight), and lots of bandwidth would be nice too.

As a note we are still looking for sponsors please contact me (derdos (at) ieee.org) if you might be interested in sponsoring our team.

Welcome the UMR AESS UAV Team blog. We are currently in the process of building an Autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) to compete in this competition, we will be competing in the Search and Rescue Challenge component of the competition. The goal is to build a UAV that will takeoff, fly to a grid that is roughly 2 miles by 2 miles, search the grid for a missing person (Outback Joe), and drop a bottle of water near him, then return and land. All of this must be done autonomously to maximize the number of points awarded. There is also a technical report and oral presentation that must be submitted.

Yesterday we performed the first manual test flight of the airplane, and thankfully everything worked perfectly, even though it was a little windy at times, which resulted in the ability to hover the plane into the wind. It seemed to have plenty of power, and easily performed loops and barrel rolls. Although in the process of transporting the plane back to the Electrical Engineering building one of the wings was damaged, although we were able to repair. Below are some pictures of the first flight of our airplane.