July 25,1996

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The mission: find a dump containing partially-buried drums of radioactive and biohazard toxic waste products, then map the location of each drum, identifying the contents by reading the drum labels and finally, bring back a sample from one of the drums. The only hitch is that this must be done without any human intervention by a flying robotic vehicle that could fit in the back of a pickup truck!

Twenty student teams from universities in Canada, the United States, and Europe took up this challenge during the 1996 International Aerial Robotics Competition. After a year of work seven teams emerged as finalists making it to the day of the competition.

Professor Rob Michelson who is a member of the research faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology and creator of this unique engineering challenge which has intrigued the best engineering minds from an international slate of universities for over half a decade is quick to point out the difficulty of the task: "Five years ago, teams were barely able to create a robot that could fly."

"Now, we are seeing aerial robots which not only fly stably, but are able to navigate and even manipulate objects on the ground" he adds.

Michelson points out that "in spite of the billions of dollars that have been spent on unmanned aerial vehicles over the past twenty years, there is still nothing that can perform the mission demonstrated by these student entries."

And that mission is one of great interest to the U.S. Department of Energy which funded the relocation of the competition to Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center near Orlando Florida. Traditionally the competition is held on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, but this year that campus is closed for use as the Olympic Village. "We decided to accept EPCOT's offer to host the competition because even though this is sort of an 'aerial robotic olympics,' we didn't want to overshadow the Atlanta Olympic games," Michelson said jokingly.

The task set before the student teams is a significant one because location and remediation of toxic waste in industrialized nations is a major problem. Even with environmental laws that prescribe the correct handling of toxic waste materials, unethical companies often secretly dispose of their waste products in unapproved and dangerous ways. In addition, large amounts of toxic waste are known to have been disposed of improperly prior to environmental legislation. In either case, the location and composition of the waste is often unknown. Investigation of toxic waste sites is a dangerous job that is well suited to unmanned systems.

Teams meeting the application deadline were:

1. Auburn University USA
2. Carleton University Canada
3. Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology (ETH) Switzerland
4. Georgia Institute of Technology USA
5. Georgia State University USA
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA
7. Mississippi State University USA
8. Oakland University USA
9. Orange Coast College USA
10. Purdue University USA
11. Rose-Hulman Institute USA
12. Simon Frazier University Canada
13. Southern College of Technology USA
14. Stanford University USA
15. Texas Tech University USA
16. University of Arizona USA
17. University of Central Florida USA
18. University of Southern California USA
19. University of Tennessee USA
20. University of Texas at Arlington USA

Prior to the competition, the acknowledged front runner and winner of the 1995 event, Stanford University, announced that they had experienced an electronics hardware failure from which they could not recover in the time remaining. Not all were disappointed by this turn of events since it meant that the field of those vying for first place had widened.

The Swiss team took an early lead by placing first in the static judging, gathering the most points for subjective measures such as "elegance of design and craftsmanship," "innovation," and even "best team Tee Shirt." For this, they were able to choose the pole position during the performance part of the competition two days later.

But it was the team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (joint with members from Boston University and Draper Labs) that won. The MIT aerial robot leapt into the air on its first run, proceeded to search for, and locate each drum correctly with the aid of differential global positioning satellite (DGPS) fixes. It then went back and attempted to read the toxic waste warning labels at the locations where it had previously identified drums to exist. No attempt was made to retrieve a sample.

The MIT aerial robot went on to demonstrate six fully autonomous reconnaissance flights during the team's hour-long time slot. During its best run it correctly located all five drums and correctly identified the contents of two of them to compile a score or 1027 points out of a possible 2310.

Michelson, who is also the Past President of the twenty five year old Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, Intl. which put up a $10,000 prize for the team that could complete the entire mission said, "Next year we will increase the mission difficulty even further to maintain the challenge for those students who refuse to acknowledge the impossible."

Those desiring more information about aerial robotics, the competition, or who wish to see the rules for the 1997 competition will want to go to the world-wide-web address:

Technical Point of Contact:

Photos available from AUVSI