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UCL Air makes Podium in International Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition
6 July 2023
UCL Air – a UCL MechEng 4th year group design project – won third-place win in the international Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition held in Maryland USA. Proudly topping all the US universities in their debut, the graduating team tell us how it happened.
Held in Maryland, USA, the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) Competition 2023 challenged university teams from across the globe to design, integrate, report on, and demonstrate a UAS capable of autonomous flight and navigation, remote sensing via onboard payload sensors, and execution of a specific set of tasks. The competition has been held annually since 2002. It was the team’s first time competing and they finished third with their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) built with state-of-the-art navigation system and advanced AI imaging system.
This year, a group of 4th year MechEng students, Armaan Abootalebi, Khalid Agha, Lung Goy, Jack Hau, Suraj Hirani, Milan Khatri and Albert Moreno formed UCL Air to compete in this annual event and came third in the competition.
We sat down with team leader Jack Hau and Suraj Hirani to chart their flying start to SUAS.
Tell us what UCL Air is.
UCL Air is a group of 4th year MechEng students who aim to improve aerospace robotics at UCL. Our team of seven successfully built an octocopter and added different capabilities to it such as obstacle avoidance, Halo delivery and image recognition. So it can basically do everything that Amazon drones can do, deliver groceries to your house, pick up an order etc.,
And what does SUAS stand for?
SUAS stands for Student Unmanned Aerial System. We have the freedom to make any form of drone capable of completing a specific mission. Some teams make VTOLS (vertical take-off and landing vehicles) and planes, whereas we just went for what we thought at the time would be simpler. It didn't turn out to be.
What were some of the most challenging aspects of getting your prototype together and getting it in the air?
I think translating from concept to an actual product is probably the hardest thing for me. So when you research or when you learn something online about, for example, obstacle algorithm, it's not always easy to translate it to an actual product where it actually works. So making sure all the subsystems were linking together was probably the hardest bit.
How did the competition go and how did you feel about it?
Overall, I think the competition went well for us. We managed to fly, complete some aspects of the mission and did some of the required waypoints. I think the best part of the mission is seeing all the other teams and learning from them. Having the opportunity to learn from Cornell University, the Royal Thai Air Force Academy and others... they were amazing and at the end we came third so it was just unreal!
Also, you learn a lot of things that maybe you wouldn't have thought of and going forward you can pass on to the current UAS team or future fourth years that may do similar projects. And what I feel about this competition is that I'm just here to inspire everybody, like the second years who also took part in the UAS challenge. I just want to get them to enjoy aerobotics as much as they can, help them as much as possible. We also have (Head of Department) Professor Bucknall and Dr. Yuanchang Liu to thank for their support in making this trip to the US possible.
The team came third overall in the competition. What do you think that was down to? We heard you beat some pretty prestigious universities. Tell us about that.
It was down to everybody just pulling themselves together and putting the maximum effort into this competition. I couldn't ask for a better teammate. In terms of our individual talents, I think it's just a wonderful mixture of seven people really and we work very well together.
The team would like to thank UCL MechEng PhD researcher Meriem Ben Miled for her support and supervision through the project.