Intro

• Georgia, Daniel, Anni, buncha other people here

• started with attendance, most people here

• Katrina for technical questions

• approach challenge however we want to, anything is allowed as long as it’s safe and meets conops requirements

  • they will only disallow things not in conops if it’s not safe ..

  • pilots take on legal liability for drone :d

• specs of hardware for tasks

  • barrels are “standard sizes”, 55gal and 5gal buckets, pretty standard

  • they will be buying the barrels right before the competition and don’t have them bought yet

  • they will be reasonable and system should be tolerant

Task 1

• red balloons simulate a plume of smoke

  • no points for any interactions with red balloons

  • do not fly into balloons

  • they make it easier to find search area

  • can look at balloons yourself

  • no autonomy

• ir beacons

  • they will be turned on (like we removed the light sensor, assume they will just cover it or something maybe?)

  • if they put seven emitters in field they only going to score the first seven entries in our kml file. don’t submit a list of a million possible points, this will be clarified in next conops release

Task 2

• can carry water in any way as long as it’s safe

• waterproofness check is for safety,

  • water should not spill onto the drone

  • drone will be tilted in any way to see if that causes spills

    • if you dangle a water storage below the drone then spilling out of that is permissible? kind of implied this, not 100% sure, we’re not planning on doing this anyways so not going to ask

Admin

• Next deadline is Nov 28 → registration

• Registration process has changed this year for teams that have already participated

  • More details given in the registration

• Should have someone designated to comp paperwork

• Hanger will be 15min drive away from flight line

  • in past years it’s been like a five minute walk so this is a big change

Questions

• Blackbird UAV

  • accommodations

    • virtual tours are available for accommodations

    • we should email them roughly how many ppl we wanna bring so they can plan accordingly

    • will be on college residences, will be dorm rooms, 4 ppl per room

    • 150 ppl max right now for entire comp, should be alright

  • carbon fiber in accomodations

    • no balconies

    • there’s space outside for composites i guess

  • code of conduct

    • they want a code of conduct for the residences in case they do anything wild

    • “leave it like you found it”

  • accommodations driving distances

    • all of medicine hat is a 10 to 15min drive so pretty easy to get around

  • flight line pictures

    • photos can be provided, will be sent to all teams.

  • ground elevation data for flight area

    • google earth has some data, imprecise

    • does owner of field have survey of land?

• Queens Aero

  • how high will 55gal barrel be filled?

    • already been answered in conops

    • challenge reset between teams, so will be consistent for everyone

    • will be filled most of the way, exact level not specified

  • emitters

    • they wont do more testing on them, they will use that exact part number

• UMUAS

  • angles of emitters

    • might be obstacles obstructing them

    • no guarentees about the obstacles

      • you may need to fly at very low altitude to see them

      • no emitter will be fully coverred from all angles

      • “some will be visible from above” so that’s a bit of a guarentee

      • safety will be considerred in the setup

      • will be equally difficult for all teams so some easier, some of them harder

• Blackbird UAV

  • pictures from the air

    • panorama shot or air shot preferred by them

    • maybe

  • emitters

    • they draw a lot of power, what is power supply for them

    • warm up substantially

    • what happens if it rains

    • AEAC testing

      • they basically said they’ll figure it out

      • will use a 5V to 20V converter

      • will make it water proof

  • calibration to the field

    • access to field on the day before to do testing

    • in general Friday is open window for testing flights

      • this is only time u can get some time to do this

      • logistics issue if lots of teams want to test for a while

    • other stuff should be done outside of flight window

    • last time had a 1hr tour for pilots, might happen again, nobody has been to flight line so far for this year

  • felix just spamming questions lmao

  • buckets & barrels

    • we will be allowed to measure the barrels and buckets when we arrive

    • they will provide them to us to look at on Friday and measure them

    • color will not be given to us until Friday

  • p16c1 conops

    • two to eight emitters in conops holds

• UMUAS

  • are there points for autonomous flight in task 1?

    • is detection and mapping seperate from flying?

    • declined to answer this pretty much.

• uvic aero

  • emitters

    • they will be on when you are flying continuously

    • they may need to be shut off during breaks between flight windows

      • makes finding them thermally more questionable

  • tree coverage of emitters?

    • declined to answer

    • no unreasonable obstacles

• Us

  • Can water spill on the drone as long as it’s not on electronics?

    • Can we spill water on the landing gear?

      • permissible safety perspective confirmed by them

      • like we can spill a bit on the gear as long as it’s not on electronics

    • judges will make a call during safety inspection

      • so basically don’t risk it

    • what angles

      • 90 degrees, specified in conops

  • What voltage will the emitters be powered at?

    • said 20V, Aliexpress page says 12V

    • confirmed what the page says

  • How will emitters be set permanently enabled?

    • theyre covering the sensor

    • they will make sure it turns on

  • Can we bring cameras and stuff on the site tour?

    • assuming there is a site tour they will give us more details later

• Blackbird

  • will there be points for automating path on task 1?

    • there are no points for autonomous flight for task 1 besides takeoff and landing

    • basically they confirmed you can fly manually the entire time and not lose any autonomy points

    • just mapping autonomously has points

    • this was confirmed from Katrina

  • kml

    • they are accepting the last kml submission

    • if you send a second file they will ignore the first one basically

  • target tank anchors

    • how will they be anchorred?

    • they don’t know

    • how much lateral force will they take?

    • might use a bungee, will specify this and let us know

    • the buckets shouldn’t tip over if we spray them with a hose

  • lottery

    • will both tasks be a lottery on the scheduling?

    • felix proposed inverting the lottery for the first task for the schedule for the second task

      • katrina will consider it, depends how nice she’s feeling

      • invite katrina to the party and she will be favorable

• ETS

  • scoring for autonomous part

    • doing it manually may be easier than doing it autonomously is their concern

    • autonomy isn’t worth that much basically

    • katrina just saying we should strategy metagame it

      • do best strategy to get as many points as possible

      • in past people struggled with RF range issues, focus on the basics being done correctly

• Queens

  • flight order lottery

    • katrina used to compete and she gets it

• uvic

  • it’s their first time competing

  • what’s allowed on flight line?

    • can bring anything

    • 5 ppl max is the real limit

      • can change between day 1 and day 2

    • you can leave stuff on the flight line or whatever, like a staging sequence is okay

  • dont fly over gun club and get shot down ….

• felix blackbird uav

  • scoring for task 2

    • the minus 30 points is brutal for something idk im not paying attention anymore

    • there’s other ways to win points, the final 30 is the ultimate challenge, highly likely nobody will do it

    • they’ve added more points to other tasks

    • scoring is intentional and a bit mean of them