After 8 months of hard work, the university teams had the opportunity to fly and prove that their autopilot programs worked. The event took place at Ball Ground’s Model Airplane field and we had a few people from the model association moderating the field. Our team lead gave a short safety briefing and off they went!
Overall, the teams did really well with their design and manufacturing plans. All of them flew ahead of the competition but we still had two crashes occur before they could test out the UAV’s autopilots. Even though the teams had self impossed missions to perform the competition doesn’t require proof of concept, just functional flying aircraft.
Clemson, Purdue, BYU, Tuskegee, Everett Community College, and GA Tech participated in this year’s cohort sponsored by Boeing, Siemens and Dassault. We had a guy from NASA show up too which was cool becausw he is also an astronaut! Thanks to the success of the program it looks like they may be adding additional schools for the 2017-2018 season. 🙂 The students had fun and we did too. Hopefully they learned how to build something better. Hehe
Congrats guys and gals!
Mrs. Enginerd - Nerd Whisperer 