History
- Sahil Kale
- Daniel Puratich
- Megan Spee
Prologue
WARG has been around since the fall of 1997, among the oldest teams at Waterloo. While a lot of our experience had been lost due to the teams' collapse in 2019 (more on this later), our documentation reveals a lot about how we ran ourselves as a team.
This document covers stuff that is well defined while History Ongoing Investigation is more hacked together from things we’ve found.
Beginnings
WARG was first founded in 1997 by Dave Kroestsch (may be Dave Kroetsch) and advised by David Wang. It may have been called “Aerial Labs” and started in 1995 according to this. Not much is known about the time here, except we built a really cool helicopter that was powered by gas. See a video here: The WARG (Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group) .
Hyperion era: 2004-2008
Sometime in 2004, the team’s leadership decided to undertake the building of a truly massive airframe, dubbed Hyperion. She featured 2 powerful 3hp electric engines and boasts a 4.3 meter wingspan, and the largest aircraft WARG has ever built to date. Her maiden flight was around June 2008 (WARG Hyperion UAV Maiden Flight ), after 4 years of constant development.
Unknown era: 2007-2012
Team lead: Trevor Smouter
Spike era: 2012-2017
In the SPIKE era, the team had found consistency in attending Unmanned System Canada’s UAS competition, as well as the AUVSI student competition. The key aircraft produced during this time included
Project SPIKE
Project Boreas
The team was led by Mitchell Hatfield until 2015, and under his direction alongside Chris Hajduk, PicPilot was complete.
From 2015-2017, Chris Hajduk, Serj Babayan, and Eric Field led the team. Interesting stories emerged, including one of Becky, the Bucket Quad mashtogether that was a result of a major crash on the original airframe WARG Becky - Bucket Quad Iris Mechanism Demonstration .
Project Hex was also completed during this time, and flew reliably, but appears to have crashed Hex, Winter 2018
Collapse: 2017-2019
Judging by dates from Confluence, this Confluence space was created in late 2017. Unfortunately, from 2017 to 2019, the team started to struggle in the areas of recruitment and direction. People were not coming into the bay as often as they once did, and the various projects undertaken by the team lacked owners and strained the financials of the team. In June of 2019, the decision was made to formally close the team, and our old bay in E7 adjacent to the machine shop was given to the faculty.
Rebirth: 2020-2021
In the spring of 2020, Anthony Berbari, a former new firmware team member and Lucy Gong, former Safety Captain, alongside Prof David Wang saw an opportunity to restart the team during COVID. Anthony had unfortunately lost his co-op due to COVID, and put his heart over the summer into restarting the team. 2 key members also joined during this time, Sahil Kale and Shrinjay Mukherjee, both of whom hadn’t started university yet but expressed an interest in joining WARG. Together, the 4 of them formed the core that worked tirelessly to stand up the young team.
As with all tiny miracles, WARG had gotten extremely lucky when the team had shut down. The SDC had planned to clean out and dispose of equipment from the old bay on March 20th, 2020 - the lockdown for the university due to COVID occurred on March 13th, 2020, and the SDC had more pressing issues to deal with. The team was never formally shut down and thus all equipment, bank account, and support infrastructure of the team was preserved. Many in the SDC don’t realize that WARG had fully shut down and restarted, nor were we questioned as we logged into our old emails and started communicating.
Given our position, we had it much easier than other teams who had to restart (ie. WatSat, Baja, etc). We came home to almost all of the equipment we needed to get started, our documentation preserved perfectly in time, members who knew somewhat where to start, and our financial accounts ready to use and with a fair bit of money in them. It didn’t take long before we were assigned a bay (E5-2003) and started growing our member base. A fun little tidbit is that due to the SDC ‘forgetting’ we stopped as a team, we did not officially sign any paperwork affiliating ourselves with the SDC until September 2021 when they realized that we had 0 proof we were a team but were making financial purchases.
The 2021 competition saw us compete virtually, but ultimately crash our airframe. Nonetheless, we got our stuff together, expanded our membership, and started to look ahead. WARG Competition Debriefs
Vanguard era: 2021-2022
The team was led by Sahil Kale and Shrinjay Mukherjee for the 2022 competition season, and saw us build our first quadcopter, Vanguard (colloquially known as Vanny), among the new re-birthed team. Derek Wright also joined the team as its new faculty advisor since David Wang was retiring soon and he wanted to hand the team off. This season saw us learning a lot as it was our first time attending competition in-person, and we learned what we didn’t know. Post-Mortem 2021-2022
Post-competition, the team got a chance to put their new-found knowledge to use in several mini-programs, such as Project Phoenix (a small testing drone intended for firmware to blow up), IMACS (integrated monitoring and command station), as well as the newest iteration of Zeropilot, Zeropilot 3.
The team also saw its culture develop by getting its own mascot and establishing its identity as ‘the pineapple team’ in S22.
Icarus era: 2022-2023
The team was led by Jinghao (Ray) Lei, Dhruv Upadhyay, and Sahil Kale for the 2023 competition season (Sahil took a 4-mo long “retirement”). Anthony (Anni) Luo took on a major role this season as the system architect, as well as assumed the responsibility of competition pilot alongside Megan Spee. The team saw a shift from scrappy to large as core membership numbers shot up to the 60s, a far cry from 30 in September of 2021. The team took on a bigger focus in engineering epic solutions in the form of ICARUS and Cornflakes (a testing prototype of ICARUS) and set aggressive deadlines throughout the program.
At the AEAC - (renamed equivalent to the Unmanned System Canada UAS competition) - WARG made a strong first impression with the unique ICARUS all-black “quad plane” airframe, presenting a 2.4 meter wingspan and weighing in at just over 15 kilograms.
Pegasus era: 2023-2024
Post-competition 2023, under the new leadership of Megan Spee, Daniel Puratich, and Anthony Luo, the team turned their attention to a different strategy. Struggles at and prior to competition 2023 highlighted a need for incremental progress and a consistent testing platform that could double as a long-term competition airframe.
In fall of 2023, WARG regained a downstairs bay in the SDC (E5 1006). The new bay, a focus on strategy, and the advancement of the flight test program led to the development of Project Pegasus, a simple quad weighing in (with batteries) at roughly 9kg at competition. With Nathan Green taking Anthony’s place as pilot and technical director the team achieved first place in both phase, overall winner, and judges award at AEAC 2024.
Current era: 2024-2025
Under direction of Daniel Puratich, Megan Spee, and Nathan Green the team has decided to focus on deliberately separating competition intent projects and learning projects. This led to the continued development of out the fully custom ZeroPilot flight controller and an experimental fixed wing program, Eclipse, to continue in parallel with our competition system. Leveraging pre-existing technology and a similar airframe to the previous cycle’s let’s us focus on optimizing our system and autonomy instead of starting from the ground up as we had in previous years.
During this cycle we brought on Brandon J. Dehart, a former member of the team and experienced faculty member, as a new faculty advisor. With Georgia Westerlund replacing Megan’s position as an executive director for Fall 2024, the team completed the successful maiden flight of the Pegasus 2 airframe (an optimized version of the previous year’s Pegasus) eight months prior to competition leaving plenty of time to focus on validating our solutions to the AEAC 2025 competition requirements.
More to be added as time keeps on slipping into the future!