Attendees

Agenda

Brief Points breakdown

Requirements Review + Questions assembly

Hard Requirements

Non-negotiable “we must have these if we want to meet our target”

“Soft” Requirements

negotiable “we can add these in and it will increase our performance if it’s possible. May revisit these as we talk about strategy”

Open Questions / Clarifying questions

Question: In 18.c., is the vehicle allowed to cross the centreline between the 2 waypoints?

Question: In 18.c., does “outside the waypoints” mean past a line perpendicular to the line segment connecting the 2 waypoints?

Question: In 18.d., how close to the takeoff point does the vehicle need to land (i.e. what is the acceptance radius)?

Question: In 18.d., is it correct to assume that once the vehicle is landed, the lap count is final (i.e. cannot land at takeoff point, then take off again)?

Question: In 18.f., what is the maximum height of the obstacles from the ground (i.e. building and containers)?

Question: In 20., how close will the physical landing pads be to the provided landing zone coordinates (i.e. what is the error)?

Question: In 21.a., will we be able to synchronize our clock with the official clock?

Question: In 21.a., is the vehicle allowed to finish the approach early and hover over a landing pad until the start of the landing time window?

Question: In 21.f., which side of the landing pad will be facing upwards (i.e. blue only, orange only, or possibly both)? Are the landing pads the same from the 2023 Student UAS Competition?

Question: In 21.g., how close to the landing pad does the vehicle need to land (i.e. what is the acceptance radius)?

Question: In 21.g., does crash landing onto the landing pad count as landing (e.g. vehicle hits a wall and then crashes)? If the vehicle autonomously hits the wall and then crashes onto the landing pad, do we get the autonomous landing points?

Question: In 21.g., when is the vehicle landing time taken? For example:

• The moment it touches down (confirmed when the rotors are stopped for 15 seconds).

• 15 seconds after the rotors stop (so the vehicle should touch down at least 15 seconds before the end of the landing time window).

• Landing completed reported to ATC (confirmed by judges to have actually landed).

• Something else?

Question: In Table 6, under Time, are the deductions for discrete increments of 30 seconds or continuous (e.g. 0.2 point deduction for 3 seconds)?

Question: Are we allowed to survey the landing areas prior to the competition?

• We would be looking for if we could update our satelite imagery.

Question: In 21.g., what is the time frame for clarifying the missing values X? In table C1, what is the time frame for clarifying the altitude limitations? We don’t need an exact estimate, just whether it will be days vs weeks vs months from now.

Strategy

Task #2

• Takeoff

• Approach is known

  • Need to report to ATC what you are doing

• Landing

  • LZ C is behind shipping containers.

    • pretty confident that 800mW will go through?

      • background noise not the same as what exists at the airport

  • will need video & sensor transmission through that.

    • LTE should work?

    • could possibly use rangefinders which give distance buffer

  • 2023-09-24

    • attempt sending video over LTE.

    • rm jetson from airside (weight saving).

    • integrate code from task #1 to give instr. from groundside.

  • Attempt LZ C. half time autonomously. pilot takeover on back half

• Communication

  • flight dir to call out.

Task #1

• Takeoff

  • Waypoint #1 @ 200m height

• Distance

  • Lots of system characterization & determining a glide slope//descent slope?

  • Flying forward a lot…

  • Likely want to run motors near peak efficiency (pinning it likely not to be best case)

    • depends on how long we expect battery to last. Needs lots of flight testing

  • Total dist. for a lap is 3km

  • potentially fly some radius around the waypoint

• Empty Weight

• Autonomy

  • very doable should get max points

  • Time / voltage based?

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• Landing

• Passenger & Cargo security

  • Cannot be shifted

Notes:

• no points for passenger comfort

  • keep in mind “would you get in this” (might be pre-flight only)

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Action items

• Anni to look at rangefinder support + weight options

Mechanical

• Cabin development

• Slowly reduce weight of 3d printed stuff

Electrical

• Look at custom power distrib pcb (instead of thick wires)

• Evaluate use of xt90’s / connector usage

• Shorten cable runs?

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EFS

• meet with anni to see what we can do

Autonomy

• RM Jetson

• Inference on ground

• Digi vid through rpi w/LTE telem.

  • breakout on ground to mp & inference.

• Evaluate how to bring desktop & breakout video

  • CV camera for rpi

Flight Test

• Determine how many batteries we’ll need for flight times

• efficiency curves, etc.

• Re-evaluate sensor stacking && what exactly we need.

  • rangefinder/proximity sensors

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