The stunning conclusion

Ladies and gents, we have finally made it back from competition. With a stable internet connection and free time now on our side, we would like to provide an in-depth update on what happened. So let's rewind everything back to 8 am on the morning of August 7th, 2013.

You could sum up our mindset at this time as one of panic and desperation. The preceding night was nothing short of awful; at least one of everything we owned broke along the way. Things that were basically unbreakable broke, and stuff that used to work suddenly didn't. It took the entire night just to break even and get back to where we were before our disasters. So at 8 am we knew that we still had a lot of tuning to do, but we were at a spot where we had a chance again.

We knew that the competition flights began at 10 am, and also that we would have 4 flights and one pass. In our position we determined that our best chance was to leave four people at the warehouse to continue testing until the vehicle at least had a chance at mission success. Meanwhile the other eleven people would go to the competition site to offer our pass and stall. We figured we were willing to miss up to two of our competition flights in exchange for testing time, if that's what it came down to.

And so we went forward with our sub-optimal and scary plan. Our brave four stayed behind and tried to tune the un-tuneable, while our scouts went ahead to report back on the situation.

When 10 o'clock came around the judges officially assigned flight times, and we learned that we would be flying sixth of six teams. This was taken to be a great thing, because we still weren't quite where we needed to be. A less great thing is that every other team seemed to be in a similar situation to us, because pretty much everyone passed on the first round. The trouble with this is that passing doesn't take very much time, so the first round of competition flights went really fast, putting us in a bit more of a pinch. After about another 40 minutes the flight-testers had to make a decision to either miss our first flight or go and start field testing. The consensus was that we would need all four of our test flights to tune the vehicle enough to have a shot at winning. So the testing folks headed over and showed up with the vehicle just in time to make the first competition flight.

Ye olde pink foam fortress-- The only known natural predator to our vehicle

Our vehicle getting ready to face its fears... or rather our fears

When our turn came up we set down the beast, held our breaths, and watched as it took off to do its job. And then, about ten seconds into the flight, it dropped out of the sky for what appeared to be no reason. 

If it had been three seconds later the vehicle would have been on the floor

This is a problem we had experienced the night before that didn't come up consistently, so we were really worried when it happened again because we still didn't know what was causing it. We had about an hour before our next flight, so the structures guys went to fixing things from the fall, and the software and circuits folks went to sniffing out the problem. The hour turned out to not be enough, though, and so we had to put our vehicle back on the line and hope that the problem would disappear like it had the night before. 

Again, vehicle went down, breaths were held, and the go button was pressed. The vehicle got into the air, and things were shaky, but it went forward towards the window. Our controller wasn't perfectly tuned, so everyone was tense as it struggled forward, and we cheered when it made it past the window. Then we all just about cried when the motors cut off and it fell again. The problem was more persistent than before and it looked like we wouldn't even get a chance to show off our software's new capabilities because we couldn't even explore the course.

WHY DON'T YOU WORK??

Our team went off again to solve the problem, now more determined because it was clearly not going to go away. And this time they figured it out. The issue was with our radio-controlled kill-switch; when the kill-switch is engaged it sends a signal to the vehicle to immediately kill power to the motors. Our problem was that there was more background noise at competition than we experienced on campus or at the warehouse, so the vehicle was receiving signals to kill motors that weren't actually being sent. We fixed the problem by increasing the number of consecutive messages that needed to be received before it would kill power.

The fix made us more optimistic for our third run. We set it down, turned it on, and were ecstatic to see it fly through the window and actually start exploring. It was still extremely nerve-wracking, because the controller was awful loose and we were wavering very close to walls. But the vehicle seemed to be doing well enough. 

This picture was exciting because the vehicle is inside the course

In this one the vehicle's not just inside, it's about to head into a new room

We still did have some problems, though. By nature, the vehicle is programmed to be afraid of walls and obstacles. This is imperative because it makes it such that the vehicle will plan paths that avoid any solid objects, which would kill it. In this test flight, though, the vehicle was tuned to be a tad bit too afraid of walls, so it had a very hard time going through door-ways. 

From the groundstation we could see that the vehicle really wanted to explore the course, but it was having a hard time. After a little while, though, the vehicle got through one of the doorways it was stuck in front of, and explored the room. It just so happened that this was the flash drive room, so everyone was really excited about how this could play out. Especially, because we were watching the map that it was generating and saw that it recognized the table. From here the vehicle is supposed to explore the table, look for the flash drive, and then retrieve it and leave. However, there was an error in the vehicle's exploration software, and for some reason it did not fully explore the table, so it did not find a flash drive. Even though it didn't quite do what it was supposed to, the vehicle thought it had done its job well and tried to move on to other parts of the course to continue its hunt for the flash drive. In the end its erratic behavior got the best of it, though, and it crashed into a wall and died.

"It looks like a dead cat" -- Joseph Potter

Based on what we saw on that run the software folks knew that there were some changes that had to be made in order to make our last attempt more successful. There was also the immediate problem of us having totaled our last vehicle. I mean the vehicle was completely demolished. Fortunately, we had planned for this, which is why we came to competition with three flight-ready vehicles. Due to time constraints, we hadn't tuned our second vehicle prior to competition, so we were in a bit of a bind there. Flight testing was not allowed at competition, except for the 15 minutes immediately before an attempt, so that would be our only chance to get things flight-ready. Until then, our dedicated programmers worked on figuring out why the vehicle didn't explore the table, and fixing it.

"Is it broken?"      "Demolished, actually"

 Two looks of intense frustration

After our third flight there was a break for lunch, which was really good for us, because it gave us even more time to repair things and try to get our vehicle flight-ready. Everyone was really busy at this point, because everything was broken. We had just demolished a vehicle, so we had to get the backup up to par, and the software folks had to make changes that would hopefully fix the weird behavior in the last flight. 

Time went by, we made our repairs, and finally it was time to set our vehicle down for the last flight. There was an extremely stressful 15 minutes of tuning, before we all held our breaths and pressed go. From there, we watched the vehicle venture forward for the last time. 

Oh you know, just tuning before our flight, what could go wrong?

Things started out the same as before-- shaky and terrifying. We watched the vehicle fly through the window, but all got very nervous when it made its way towards the smallest rooms in the test course. Somehow, the vehicle decided that different parts of the course were more interesting than the ones it chose for the third run. During its travels it ended up in the smallest room in the entire test course; a death-trap of a room that was roughly closet sized. The vehicle made its way in without a problem, but had a hard time navigating back out, and ended up crashing. Our hearts sank as we heard the sound of it crashing into those cursed foam walls, and we knew that it was over. 

And so ends our competition this year. Despite our hard work, we ended up not accomplishing our goal of completing the mission. However, we are still extremely proud of all of our work, and the strides we made from last year. Following competition was the awards banquet, where it was announced that our team won Best System Design, Best Presentation, and first place in the North American Venue. There is, however, an Asian venue as well, and it turns out that one of the teams there successfully completed the mission. That accomplishment marks the end of mission 6 of the IARC, which means that this was our last chance at the ultimate prize for this particular mission. However, the judges are currently finalizing the details of mission 7, and MAAV has been looking for competitions outside of IARC to compete in. So, even though we were unable to take home the grand prize, we have all learned a lot and are coming out of this as better people. There was a lot to learn from our four years of involvement with IARC mission 6, and we look forward to future competitions and to tackling more challenging tasks.

At this time we would like to sincerely thank everyone who has followed along with us and who has believed in us. It's the support of our peers, friends, and family that helps us to move forward. We would also like to thank our sponsors for all of their support. Without the folks at Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, the University's college of engineering, and the departments of aerospace, computer science, and electrical engineering, none of this would be possible. Thank you all for following along with us this competition season, we look forward to doing it all again next year. 

The proud summer 2013 members of MAAV

Update on Past two days -- Rough Preliminary Version

Okay all, we have let you down again on the blog updates. It is not completely our faults, I promise, there were severe technical difficulties in the way; we ran into problems with blogging itself, but also with our vehicle. So if nothing else, the fact that we haven't updated should tell you all that we at least have our priorities straight, because we were busy fixing things.

Before we get too far into this, we would like to share the presentation that was mentioned earlier.  You can find the technical presentation that was delivered by José Gomez here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB4lDshla4s

A LOT has happened since the last blog update. We want to start from where we left off, which was late last night (aka, the night of August 6th and into the morning of August 7th). The easiest way to explain it is that EVERYTHING BROKE AND WE HAD NO IDEA WHY. Honestly, everything, it was overwhelming. From software to hardware the aspects of our vehicle were picked off one by one as if they were the stars of some kind of bizarre horror movie.

This put the team into a bit of a scramble. We basically had to pull together for a divide and conquer approach and just try to tackle everything at once. Things started reallllly going poorly around 11 pm/12 am. We experienced a few severe crashes while simulating end-to-end missions of the IARC, and sensors started acting funny; the use of the word funny here is very loose, because the behavior was erratic and incredibly frustrating to deal with.

By 1 am we were unable to do any good flight testing. Our vehicles were unstable and flying with bugs that seemed impossible to find and fix. However, we knew that the competition flights didn't begin until 10 am, so we were set to work through the night up until the competition began.

Around 6 am things were calming down. A lot of problems had been cleared out, and we could begin flight testing again, but we still had a ways to go. A lot of the team had succumbed to naps in various places that weren't intended for napping, but we always had at least five to ten people awake and working on flight testing and vehicle repairs.

It was at 8 am that we had to make some strategic decisions. For competition each team is given four trial runs and one pass. We knew that we had a lot of work to do before we had a chance and completing the mission, so we sent eleven of our members to represent MAAV at the competition site, while leaving four behind for testing. The rationale behind this was that it was impossible to test once we were at the competition site, and the vehicle at 8 am was unable to complete the mission. So the goal was to have eleven members present to offer a pass on our first turn, and then to continue stalling until our test vehicle was ready to fly.

And so we went forth with our plan, with time ticking and the stress really weighing on the entire team. We lucked out a bit in that we ended up drawing last in the flight rotation, which gave us the most possible time to maximize our system. We still weren't ready for our first turn, though, so our eleven members on site went to stalling and officially passed for our first turn.

Meanwhile, things were being cleaned up on the competition vehicle off-site, but still were not looking as clean as we had hoped. Knowing that our first flight time was fast approaching, the team made the decision to cut our losses and show up at competition with our not-so-perfectly tuned vehicle. We figured that we had a better chance of completing the mission with a vehicle that contained "mystery bugs" than we did of solving those mystery bugs and developing a perfect vehicle in time for our flights.

So we showed up in time to compete for all four of our allotted trials. During our first two runs our vehicle experienced an extremely bizarre failure where it would kill mid-air without any rhyme, reason, or warning. The behavior was terrifying, and we were worried that we wouldn't even be able to get a chance and recovering the flash drive. Fortunately, we were able to fix it and were autonomously exploring the course by our third attempt. During this attempt we autonomously explored the compound, located a table, and then approached the table to search for the flash drive. Unfortunately, it was that last absolutely essential step that failed, and even though the vehicle "swept" the table it was unable to find the flash drive due to some turning errors.

Based on our third run we tuned our vehicle, changed parameters in a way that we thought would maximize our chances of success, and then went forward into the unknown. We must unfortunately announce to you, though, that our fruits were unsuccessful in that we were unable to fully complete the mission statement.

I know that this is a lot of information at once, but we wanted to let you all know exactly what our status was. However, I, the current author of the blog, have been up for 48+ hours straight and am exhausted. We have a lot of videos and pictures to share, and tomorrow I will be elaborating upon what exactly happened at competition. Apologies for any typos, but this is intended to be a rough update for our situation.

It's been more than a few hours since our last check-in, and quite a bit has happened, actually.

First off, allow us to say that we are sorry about the absence of videos. We promised some cool footage earlier, but we're facing some technical difficulties and haven't had to time to get around them. As far as we're concerned, watching the vehicle fly is one of the coolest parts about the project, and it's a minor tragedy that you guys don't get the chance to see that. Once we get things figured out we'll get those out there for you guys.

Look, a picture of it flying, that's almost as cool as a video right?

Now, onto more interesting business. We have been testing all day and are at a bit of a cross-roads. Earlier in the day we embarked upon the exciting challenges of end-to-end competition testing. In doing this we also embarked upon the much less exciting and far more frustrating world of end-to-end competition problems. This is to be expected with any system, and things are still going well, but there are problems in the system that have to be addressed. Some of the problems could potentially be alleviated with new hardware and so testing has begun. We are fortunate enough to have 15 people here right now, so work has been divvied up and multiple avenues are currently being explored.

One of the things we are considering is stepping up from a 3 cell LiPo battery to a 4 cell LiPo. Doing this would increase the voltage of our system, which would in turn increase the maximum force output of our motors. The thought here is that we would have more control authority of our vehicle, and we would be able to maintain a more stable flight. One problem that we have here is that increasing the voltage of our system would actually change the calibration of our motors. Put simply, increasing voltage means that we would not know exactly what force our motors are outputting anymore. The problem is easily fixed by measuring the RPMs that the motors when given a specific command from the computer. Unfortunately, we do not have a tachometer (which is the device you would use to do this). So, the obvious fix here, is to make our own. I'm sorry if all of that sounds complicated, the take-away is that we don't know how fast our motors are spinning, and to figure it out we had to build our own measurement device.

We made a homemade tachometer, it's casual

With a little bit of work we successfully calibrated the motors with 4 cell batteries, and made it a viable option.

Another thing that could help us is to switch to more powerful motors. We still have an air frame from last year's competition, which is outfitted with new motors. The circuit board has changed since then, but it is a pretty straightforward process to switch to the new board. We put some of our electrical engineering wizards on the job and are about ready to fly on the old frame.

Out with the old, in with the new. Jenny's replacing the old board

We are not completely certain that these are changes we want to make, though, so we also have to make sure that the old system is still functional. Part of this is repairing the vehicle when it crashes, which, by the way, it did earlier. This isn't a huge deal, really just more of a minor headache. We were testing inside the test course (did you see the panorama of that by the way? It's pretty cool), the vehicle strayed a bit to close to a wall, and we lost control. To avoid injury to ourselves and the vehicle Joe and José pulled ropes and the vehicle casually struck the table on its way down. None of our sensors were damaged, but we did crack an arm. This is a really common failure so the structures team had no problem applying the routine fix. The vehicle was reassembled and has since been flight tested (it still works!)

Our competition flights will be beginning in approximately 10 hours so it's going to be a late night, but things are going well and we're keeping our chins held high.

We don't expect you all to stay up all night with us, but we'll continue updating for all of our insomniac followers.

Off-site Testing is the Best Testing

As a team, we have often said, "When you can't come to the course, make the course come to you." Actually, we have never said that, but still it holds true. We are happy to say that our vehicle is developed to the point that the only way to move forward is to run an end-to-end trial simulating the IARC. To do this, we have to build a course that is similar to the one we will be exploring at competition. These kinds of operations take space, and we are happy to say that TGlobal has welcomed us into their warehouse and given us space to build anything our hearts desire. Yesterday afternoon we met with Tommy Kenville, the owner of the space, and he gave us the majority of his warehouse to build in. We have taken full advantage of his offer, and spent most of yesterday erecting a test course.

And it only took 11 hours!

Yes, it's true, we are a bit ashamed of how long it took to build the course, but we had a few mishaps, these things happen. Take it from us that you don't want to build anything out of PVC pipe, no matter how convenient the joint connectors are. It is NOT structural, it WILL bend, and the whole thing will be a mess. After way too many hours fiddling with PVC, we wised up, got some wood, and built a real structure. We have tactfully created "walls" by papering the space in between beams, and this ensures that if our vehicle for some reason goes crazy, it can do so without destroying itself on a solid wall. Instead, it will break through the paper. Of course, we'll still be killing it mid-air, so there's the possibility that it'll get damaged in a fall, but the break-away frame does pretty well to mitigate damage in these scenarios. 

With everything in place we were able to begin testing our system and ensure that things that used to work still work, and we have begun polishing things that are less functional into their final form. 

We've taken a few exciting videos, and are currently uploading those to Youtube. As soon as those things get through we will link them here. 

This morning was also rather eventful, as it was the day of the symposium aspect of the competition. Each team delivered a presentation about their system and their approach to the mission. We were proudly represented by José Gomez, who spoke his little heart out about our vehicle for about 20 minutes. This presentation was filmed and is also being added to Youtube for anyone who is interested. 

The presentation is about more than just making teams look good though. It also plays a role in the "static judging" aspect of things. Static judging is based on the teams' submitted technical papers, as well as their presentations. The team that earns the highest static judging score wins an extra attempt at the course (bringing the total attempt count from the standard 4 to the hard-earned 5). We will hear how we did later, and by tomorrow the judges will announce who wins the extra attempt. 

Expect a lot from us today, we hope to share a few videos and a lot of cool pictures. And don't forget, tomorrow is the big day! Competition flights will begin at 11 am EST. 

We have arrived

After 18 hours of traveling, we have finally arrived in scenic Grand Forks, ND. Fortunately the trip was without incident, not counting the extra hour of travel due to construction delays. Needless to say, research is being done on alternate routes for the trip back. We apologize for not updating sooner, but all of Saturday was spent packing. This multi-hour process basically boils down to taking everything inside of a large room and figuring out how to get it into four mini-vans. If there was even a chance that we would need something at competition, it was packed.

It's a lot like Tetris, but not fun

We also spent Saturday making some last-minute changes to the vehicle and stocking spare parts. The structures team miraculously removed 70 grams from one vehicle, enabling the use of more powerful batteries. We also stocked up on supplies for the trip. This almost exclusively included food-- lots of food. Brownies, trail mix, granola bars, popcorn, chips, fruit, and more. We learned that it takes about an hour to wash enough fruit to supply four vans full of hungry engineers. 

With all the food (and supplies) packed we set up our driving rotations and hit the road. And then, almost instantly, exhaustion set in and people dozed off, thus beginning the best part of any road trip – pictures of people sleeping.

Real men sleep with their arms crossed

He’s just a tired little guy

Research has long suggested that having your drivers asleep behind the wheel is not a great idea, so we did our best to avoid this. We stocked up on copious volumes of coffee and rotated drivers every four hours or so. To avoid confusion and make sure everyone was on the same page we equipped each vehicle with a two way radio, which made us feel pretty cool. We arrived in Grand Forks at approximately 2 pm local time. Our rooms were not ready when we arrived, so we relaxed in the hotel lobby.

 Relax is code for sleep

And now, here we are, a few naps and some meals later. We have settled into a conference room where we will be posted up for the night, until tomorrow when we can move into warehouse space and erect a test course. 

Stay tuned for more updates! 

Accidents Happen

Though it may be hard to believe, accidents do in fact happen while testing. Today our vehicle had a bit of a mishap while landing, and killed motors while it was still in the air. Fortunately we test while having two people on rope duty, which is exactly what it sounds like- two ropes are tied to opposite legs of the vehicle and can be used to catch it in case of emergency.

A fine example of what it means to hold ropes

Thanks to the cat-like reflexes of the rope holders, we were able to catch the vehicle before it hit the ground. This means that we were able to avoid any serious damage to the lasers or anything else that's über expensive. The bad thing is that we put a lot of stress on the legs attached to the rope and ended up deforming the body of the vehicle. The good thing is that we are "trained professionals" (the quotes let you know how serious we are) and were able to put everything back into shape. As in we literally bent it back into shape. Below is a shot of Carl Kerhsaw reassembling the vehicle after its lifesaving surgery.

Just putting on the last pieces before getting out to fly again

Moral of the story: another bullet dodged team.

Welcome to the Blog!

Hello friends of MAAV! We are excited about this year's competition and look forward to sharing our experiences with you. For those who don't know, MAAV is the Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicle team. For three years we have been designing and fabricating autonomous aerial vehicles to compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC). If you didn't know that then you probably also did not know that we will be leaving this Saturday to compete in the IARC.

The IARC is an eighteen-year old competition that is on its sixth challegne. Since 1995 IARC has been designing challenges that are impossible to meet with what is available at the time of release. The goal is to have teams develop the necessary technologies to meet the challenge.

Currently, the mission boils down to a few key components: competitors must design a vehicle that can autonomously enter an unknown compound, search the building, read posted signs on the wall, avoid cameras and obstacles, and detect a flashdrive. Then the vehicle must retrieve the flashdrive, deploy a decoy, and exit safely. For more information on the competition please visit http://iarc.angel-strike.com/

At last year's competition we were the first team to successfully enter the building, map the interior, and exit completely autonomously. We have had a year to develop the software and hardware that we will need to identify and retrieve a flash drive, and are eager to see how things will play out.

Until the day of our competition flights (August 7th), we will be working double-time to polish things up and get everything in working order. We intend to be working tirelessly until then, even in North Dakota (the site of the competition), and will be updating with pictures and news the entire time.

Also, please allow us to take a moment to thank all of you for your love and support. To our friends and family, thank you for your interest in what we do, and for understanding why we have essentially dropped off the face of the Earth for the past summer. We also have to acknowledge our tremendous sponsors, your funding has allowed us to achieve greatness, and we look forward to maintaining our relationships with you over the coming years. And a final thanks goes to our academic advisors, your insights have proved invaluable.

You all will be hearing from us again soon!