History Ongoing Investigation
- Megan Spee
- Daniel Puratich
Introduction
Trying to make the website more interesting by adding a timeline/ a bit of info about warg’s history. This document was created to investigate warg history in a less-structured fashion than the primary history doc. For anything we know to be true and is well structured just move it over to History . Anyone is welcome to add stuff they find here.
Research
Using following resources:
Found https://youtu.be/WBA1pjATJ18 from EMR Laboratories - emrlabs.ca and seems obviously warg related from 2013.
1997 Dave Kroetsch founded WARG. https://dronebelow.com/2017/11/30/interview-dave-kroetsch-cto-co-founder-aeryon-labs/ . Someone (unnamed/anonymous) confirmed this with @Daniel Puratich when met in person, didn’t get their name but they were around when the team started. Said the team flew on some baseball diamonds and had a demo at a gas plant (which may have gone poorly) back then. Also mentioned a lot of WARG members applied to (and maybe didnt get an offer for lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeryon_Labs . Aidan Bowers https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-bowers/ confirmed that FLIR acquired a company that was started by WARG members. According to wikipedia this seems to be highly likely to be Aeryon Labs which was acquired in 2019. FLIR was acquired by Teledyne (and became teledyne FLIR) as of 2021 (according to google). Aidan Bowers as of 2024 works for FLIR so is a reliable source here. Hoping in the future (this is being written in 2024) we can develop our team’s relationship with teledyne further!
competed with a gas-powered helicopter in 1998.
Millennial International Aerial Robotics Competition. https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/1998/oct/16fr.html
“UW's winning aerial robotics team, which placed second in this year's Millennial International Aerial Robotics Competition, will hold a presentation from 2 to 5 p.m. for people from local high technology companies”
1999 - Competed in Washington State IARC.
https://iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca/pdf/s99se.pdf
"The Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group, who departed last week for the Millenial International Aerial Robotics Competition amid little fanfare (the members were too busy working hard on midterms and the helicopter), have come back with another extraordinary performance. They are currently in third place behind University of Berlin and Simon Fraser but won the Best Design Award for the second year running as well as picking up awards for the Best Technical Presentation. More detailed info to follow after the team members recover from the grueling competition. This year saw the team enter two helicopters and a ground vehicle which bodes very well for next year's finals."
https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/1999/jul/05mo.html
2000 - competed in Washington State IARC
https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2000/jul/05we.html
“Break in” into the ECE lab, warg equipment stolen. https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2000/jun/22th.html
2001 - Warg competing in IARC
https://www.micropilot.com/news-2001-jul-23.htm
Also, a researchgate page by David Kroetsch https://www.researchgate.net/figure/WARGs-Hybrid-Intelligent-Control-Agent_fig2_237129315
2002 - warg using QNX https://forums.openqnx.com/t/topic/20206/2
2003 - https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2003/aug/06we.html
The Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group came fourth in this year's International Aerial Robotics Competition, held at Fort Benning, Georgia.
"The team only began development three months prior to the competition, when we received our new aircraft from the manufacturer. Two weeks before the competition, one of our custom hardware boards needed to be shipped to California for repair. The onboard computer system was finished only 24 hours before WARG was scheduled to leave for Georgia; as a result, some of the testing was done in the van on the way down as the plane was driven around corners and up hills.”
2004 - Comp in Georgia. Also talked about in 2005 after winning. “The University of Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group (WARG) is competing this week in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) in Fort Benning, Georgia. https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2004/jul/26mo.html
WARG is currently one of the leading teams in the IARC, having won first place in 2004 and ranking second overall among 20 teams from Canada and the United States”
https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2005/jul/20we.html
https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2004/jul/26mo.html
2004 - Hyperion era
Large plane. Flew in 2008. https://bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2008/jul/21mo.html
Team spent 4 years building this.
2009-2010 - apparent 2009 hiatus
https://www.slideserve.com/nathan/waterloo-aerial-robotics-group
2010 WEEF presentation
2011 - competed under “Team Zephyr” University of Waterloo (UAV)
https://www.suasnews.com/2011/05/unmanned-systems-canada-2011-student-uav-ugv-competition-results/
2012 - Hybrid tricopter
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10150921608441855
Videos can be found in https://www.youtube.com/@UWARG/videos searching for oldest posted videos
2014 - Anaconda
2016 Proof of flight for Spike
2017-18 “Bucket Quad” “Becky”
2018 - Hex
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.
2020-2021 - more spike
David wang was faculty advisor at the time I believe:
rest is covered in
https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/createpage.action?spaceKey=BUS&title=History