Ryerson-2017 season project

[Frank v B]

We started off at the field at noon today with the 2017 Ryerson project.  The competition is at the end of April in Northern Quebec.

Project description. 

A remotely piloted vehicle must fly over a field littered with mock Canada goose nests.  Some are empty, some have sitting pairs but only one will have a clutch of eggs.
The RPV must fly over the entire field and photo map it with an onboard camera.  The data is sent to the base station where it is photo-stitched into one photographic topographical map.  The nests must be identified as one of 4 species of goose via adapted facial recognition software.  Each nest will be GPS tagged for longitude and latitude.
The RPV must then be sent to the one nest containing the eggs, land on the nest and grab one egg and return it in one piece to the base station.  Oh, yes, all this with autonomous flight using the GPS nest locations identified earlier.
The base station has a tracking antenna to receive all the data and photographs.  It automatically tracks the Quad wherever it goes at whatever height.

Today's flight used a large quad with a 6 cell 5000mah battery, carbon props.  Peter P identified it as a 650 size.  The entire flight was fully autonomous on a pre-programmed flight path at pre-programmed heights.  When Zach started off the mission he just gave it a start command and it automatically took off from the south end of the runway... absolutely rock-steady- flew in a slow lazy circle within the cut field and landed in exactly the same spot on the runway.  Again, rock steady, slowly and very deliberately.  Very impressive.

How this world has changed in the last 3 years.

Frank