Mississippi State University’s Xipiter team, a student team of engineers, finished second overall in the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition in June 2010.
The program, hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International of the Webster Field Naval Reservation in Maryland, matched 25 different universities on their unmanned aircraft technology and ability to recreate military search operations.
During the competition, airplanes had to successfully take off, land and fly autonomously on auto-pilot while locating targets, usually geometric features or numbers.
Calvin R. Walker, senior flight test engineer, said Xipiter had to find up to 10 targets with its aircraft.
“The procedures that [Xipiter] followed were more in tune to what you would actually see in a flight test environment or a military mission environment,” he said. “The procedures that our team follows is basically a military or government flight test operation procedure.”
Randy Follet, assistant professor for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said aircrafts had to pass a safety test before entering the AUVSI competition.
“One of the obvious things that you want to take care of is that the vehicle would be safe and [that] it would not come apart while in the air, or present any dangers to the people who would be operating it,” Follet said.
The Xipiter team is working on improving the primary link between the ground station and the aircraft.
 If contact is lost, aircrafts are programmed to crash.
Follet said pilots can switch from auto-pilot to manual if they notice a weak connection.
The competition began with oral presentations, which account for 25 percent of each team’s final ranking.
Walker said oral presentations were mission briefings which told the judges what each team would do on the field.
Eric Hill, team leader for Xipiter, said the oral presentations went well.
“We did a great job presenting both aspects of the system, both the airframe and avionics side,” he said.
The team finished third in the category.
Competitors also had to submit a journal paper to further describe the system.
Journals counted for 25 percent of each team’s final ranking and had to be submitted electronically.
The Xipiter team placed third in the category, Follet said.
“[A journal] describes the … avionic systems they have on board and how they’re going to conduct the mission as far as what test procedures and what flight operations procedures they are going to use,” Walker said. “The paper also describes the system’s engineering design of the unmanned system.”
The remaining 50 percent of final rankings were determined by each team’s performance during flight demonstration.
Mission teams, aside from the pilot, could not consist of more than 10 members
Each team was allowed to have one adviser, Follet said.
Walker said the Xipiter team’s aircraft had cameras which allowed the pilot to take pictures of targets and then submit still images to judges for scoring.
Walker said Xipiter found approximately eight targets during the competition.
Extra credit was given for an autonomous takeoff and landing, but the Xipiter team flew on manual for both.
For the landing, Xipiter’s engine shut off, and the team had to troubleshoot.
“In my opinion, I thought we did well in all [areas], but obviously there’s room for improvement,” Walker said.
Xipiter finished sixth in the flight demonstration category.
Walker said students are working on autonomous takeoff, landing and target recognitions, as well as improving their camera systems.
The company Imperx is planning to sponsor new cameras for the team, Walker said.
North Carolina State University ranked first in flight demonstration and won the overall AUVSI competition.
The Xipiter team won the competition in 2008 and came in fifth in 2009.
Follet said the Xipiter team was formed in 2002, during the second year of the competition.
Hill said ranking highly in the AUVSI competition is a reflection of the students’ work on the team.
“The most rewarding thing is seeing us solve problems, which is fundamentally what engineering is all about,” he said.