Team Melbourne is again entering the Open Search and Rescue Challenge section of the 2010 Australian Outback UAV Challenge.
After receiving the equal first encouragement award in 2009, we had no choice but to come back in 2010 to win! :)
Teams come from all over the world to compete.
The Open Search and Rescue Challenge is open to aerospace enthusiasts and university students from any institution.
The competition
will be held from at the end of September 2010 at Kingaroy airport in Queensland, Australia. Kingaroy is approximately 220 km's north west of Brisbane, and is the site for a new UAV test and training centre being used by Boeing Australia and ARCAA.
In a nutshell, the challenge involves entrants to build a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) to find Outback Joe, a lost bushwalker in desperate need of assistance.
Around 4Km South of the airport is the search area where Outback Joe will be located, somewhere.... It is roughly 2Km X 3Km in area. The objective for the entrants is for their UAV to fly autonomously (pre programmed) to the search area and begin looking for Outback Joe. Once he is found, teams then to report to the Judges with the GPS Co-ordinates of the location of Joe. If the judges agree that he is within that area, they then have permission to drop a 600ml bottle of liquid (water/soft drink) to him from the UAV.
The team that drops the bottle the closest to Outback Joe without hitting him or breaking the bottle is the winner, as long as you can accomplish all of this within 1 hour!
In the previous 3 years of the competition, no one has been able achieved this.
Until Now! :)
