The Fourth IARC Mission has been completed
Finalists went Head-to-Head in the World’s Premier Aerial Robotics Competition
as $80,000 was awarded in a ceremony held at Ft. Benning, Georgia

The 18th annual AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) was conducted from 28 July to 1 August 2008 at Ft. Benning’s (Georgia) McKenna MOUT site, which is a special facility having a complete uninhabited village for use in urban warfare games. This particular venue was important to the 4th IARC mission which involved interaction of the aerial robots with buildings (finding, identifying, entering, relaying of information from within). Teams from as far away as India joined others from Canada and the USA at Ft. Benning Georgia to compete in AUVSI's longest running and most challenging robotics event. Collegiate teams built flying robots that are completely autonomous and had to fly a 3km ingress path (Level 1) to find a city where a particular building will be identified along with its openings (Level 2). The aerial robots then had to select an opening and either fly into the building or send in an autonomous sensor probe to search for a particular target and send pictures of the target back 3km to the starting point (Level 3). Level 4 put all of these autonomous aerial robotics behaviors together to perform the entire mission seamlessly in under 15 minutes (see mission description in the Official Rules).

All levels of our 4th Mission were accomplished independently and sequentially, but in the end, time ran out for the teams before they could demonstrate all of the levels contiguously in under 15 minutes (the requirement for "winner take all"), so the $80,000 in accumulated prize monies over the past 8 years was distributed by the Judges as follows (based on demonstrated performance):
(movie sources below: #1 2008 © R.C. Michelson; #2 courtesy of Bergen R/C Helicopters, Cassopolis MI 49031)

	SUMMARY OF AWARDS TO IARC 4th MISSION FINALISTS: ABES Engineering College California State University - Northridge Embry Riddle/DeVry Georgia Institute of Technology Pima College South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Southern Polytechnic Institute & State University University of Arizona University of Waterloo Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University	(Total = $80,000) $1,200 $2,200 $12,200 $27,700 + Most Innovative Sys.1 $5,200 $8,200 + Best Paper, Best T-shirt,                & Most Innovative Sys.2 $1,200 $1,200 $3,200 + Best Vehicle $17,700 + Most Innovative Sys.3
	Sponsors for the 2008 IARC were AUVSI (Prize money, logistics, insurance), the JAUS Program Office (logistics), with contributions from the Columbus AUVSI Chapter (toward the Team Banquet), and NovAtel (on site GPS field engineering). The host for the 2008 event was the U.S. Army, Ft. Benning Soldier Battle Lab. The volunteering judges are UAV experts-- Aaron Kahn, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; Don Lacey, retired Air Force, DARPA, and Raytheon Corp.; Ken Thurman, retired Air Force and currently President of Aware Concepts. The organizer of the event is Prof. Robert C. Michelson, a past President of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and originator of the IARC. He is Principal Research Engineer Emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and President of Millennial Vision, LLC. Watch this site !! 2009 will be the beginning of the new 5th IARC Mission!

Officially registered teams for the 4th Mission were:

ABES Engineering College

Army Institute of Technology, University of Pune

California State University, Northridge

Delhi College of Engineering, University of Delhi

DeVry Calgary

École de Technologie Supérieure

Georgia Institute of Technology

LeTourneau University

Mesa State College

North Carolina State University

Ohio State University

Pima Community College

Purdue University

Rose-Hulman Institute

Simon Fraser University

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Southern Polytechnic State University

University of Alabama in Huntsville

University of Arizona

University of Calgary

University of Central Florida

University of Iowa

University of New Mexico

University of Ottawa

University of Texas at Austin

University of Waterloo

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

See who's been watching us now. Also, here are some other places that have information about the International Aerial Robotics Competition:

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ,

Ohio State University ,

Purdue University ,

LeTourneau University ,

CSUN ,

WARG- University of Waterloo ,

Delhi College of Engineering ,

ABES Engineering College ,

University of Alabama in Huntsville ,

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology ,

University of Arizona ,

Pima Community College ,

Southern Polytechnic State University ,

Georgia Tech's "GTAR" ,

Simon Fraser University Firefly ,

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH - Zurich) ,

Carnegie Mellon University ,

1995/96 MIT / Boston University / Draper team ,

Technische Universitaet Berlin ,

Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory ,

Other Robotic Competitions .

Here are some places that have information about aerial robotics in general:

UAV Center

Wikipedia: UAVs

Wikipedia: Entomopter

Wikipedia: IARC

1st US-Asian Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) Demonstration/competition

Directory of rockets, missiles, and UAVs .

Here are some places that have information about early developmental aerial robotics systems:

NRaD AROD ,

AMGSSS ,

         Chedd-Angier Production Company
         70 Coolidge Hill Road
         Watertown, MA  02172
         (617) 926-8300 (Voice)
         (617) 926-2710 (FAX)

         CNN Tape Library Sales
         One CNN Center
         Atlanta, GA  30348
         (404) 827-1335 (Voice)