IARC MISSION 8

Project Introduction

The IARC (International Aerial Robotics Competition) is an international competition in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) field.Every year, many teams from various countries and universities around the world participate in the competition to take on the challenges.The IARC has been held for 33 years, moving the state-of-the-art in aerial robotics forward on several occasions through its nine missions that were “impossible” at the time they were first proposed, with the latest being the 10th mission.

In IARC Mission 8 scenario setting, a single person working with team of aerial robots, attempts to retrieve a critical component that necessary to prevent a reactor from failing. Opposing aerial robotic sentries will attempt to prevent that person from interfering with reactor operation.Compared to the previous generations of tasks, the mission places a greater emphasis on the collaborative and interactive capabilities between humans and drones without electronic command or control, as well as the swarm interaction between aerial robots.

The detailed rules for the 2018 IARC Mission 8 can be found in the Mission 8 rules,and for more information about IARC you can visit the official website AUVSI Foundation International Aerial Robotics Competition。

System Overview

System Architecture

We chose a DJI M100 with guidance as our aerial platform to execute bins searching and code detecting task, a laptop as operator’s handheld device to identify voice command and communicate with drones, and a AP base station with 4G net to provide Wifi network for operator and drones. The overall architecture is as follows.

The system's hardware is as follows.

Software Architecture

We develop our system based on ROS(Robot Operating System),setting laptop as ROS Master and several ROS Nodes communicate by ROS Topic. ROS Node on laptop runs for voice command acquisition, recognition, parsing, and publish. ROS Nodes on Nvidia run for flight control and bin code detection,recognition and publish.

The overall software modules are as follows.

Demonstration

Here is some segments of competition process at the venue, our operator can successfully control the UAV helper via the simple voice commands to find the box. However, because the texture of the venue was too sparse the UAV helper cannot hover above the box stably.So we don’t get password and complete the mission finally.

Achievements

This the first year of IARC mission 8. Our Team got best technical demonstrate reward for our technical solution and actual performance.

Acknowledgement

The achievement in this competition is attributed first to the research platform provided by the Control and Simulation Center. We extend our deepest gratitude to Prof. HE Fenghua for her dedicated mentorship as our faculty advisor. Thanks to Team Captain WANG Ningyuan for exceptional leadership and Vice Captain HAO Ning for efficient coordination. Finally, we thanks to the collaborative efforts of all team members.