• Oct 3, 2024 Autonomy system has been ground tested on Pegasus 2

• Oct 5, 2024 Fly Autonomy on Pegasus 2, run Geolocation and maybe clustering

• Oct 26, 2024 Fly task 1 code for the first time

• Nov 2, 2024 Fly task 2 (might be tight)

• May 9, 2025 Competition

CONOPS link: https://www.aerialevolution.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2025-AEAC-Competition-CONOPS-v1.0-11-September-2024.docx.pdf

• TASK 1: Autonomous take-off / landing, but manual flying in between? (seek clarification)

  • Front camera only required to get to fire zone if autonomous (finding red balloons) (if not autonomous, pilots already have front camera)

  • 1. Take off autonomously to a certain height

  • 2. Pilot fly to balloons

  • 3. Start search pattern and detection of IR emitters. At the same time, pilots can monitor the video feed to find the “source of fire”

    • Need to decide what happens when source of fire is found. Most likely solution is to do geolocation groundside

    • Other solutions involve either pausing the mission and going ontop of source to get coordinates and then resuming mission, or coming back to coordinates once search pattern is done

  • 4. Pilots fly back / RTL

  • 5. Auto-landing script

• TASK 2: Only run autonomous water delivery once (last run)

  • Pathing (all locations are given beforehand)

    • Decide which buckets to go to

    • Request pilots to leave closest bucket for autonomous

  • Only autonomy when within 5m sphere of water buckets/unload buckets

    • Request another camera, 1 IR (for task 1, directly down), 1 RGB (directly down for task 2 finding buckets + task 1 finding source of fire for pilots)

      • Or it might be possible to only use 1 camera. For task 1, make it have the IR filter. For task 2, take off IR filter and use as regular camera

    • Depends on mech’s implementation of picking up water/releasing it, might be offloaded to EFS

• Geolocation - Top priority Oct 26, 2024

  • 1. Using geolocation to get location of IR emitters

  • 2. Fly right on top of IR sensor, then just read GPS data? Centering above the IR emitter

  • 3. Work on both solutions at the same time

• Detection stuff (combined with ML) Oct 26, 2024

  • Can’t fly too high - flight test it to see how high we want to fly (flight test, starting next term after Geolocation and Detection is done)

  • 1. Use ML model to find “brightspots” (new data collection and more)

  • 2. OpenCV to find “brightspots” ← most likely solution

• Cluster Estimation - Top priority Oct 26, 2024

  • 1. Take in large number of data points/locations from Geolocation, and group them

• Autonomous water task

  • Loading, unloading

  • Precise coordinates, or precise controls to center drone on water

  • Use CV camera, for edge detection of buckets for loading and unloading (as GPS coordinates might not be precise enough)

• Airside vs groundside compute

  • We are doing AIRSIDE compute for this competition

  • Also, video feed will most likely sent from drone to groundstation

• Search pattern

  • Search within radius of 100m from “sign of fire” (tower of balloons) Oct 26, 2024

    • 1. Go to sign of fire as center (mark coordinates down manually)

    • 2. Fly spiral/concentric rings (either manually or have someone input it into mission planner or have a script ready)

    • Generate this path given center, radius, drone’s view width

  • Eventually merge Pathing into “airside”

  • Start with searching manually, eventually get to autonomous search pattern

• KML Oct 26, 2024

  • Record the coordinates from detection, then translate into KML file

  • Do read CONOPS for formatting

• IR Camera

• Detection - Fires

• Detection - Source (940nm IR emitters)

• Possibly Detection - Fire sign (red balloons)