Students compete in smart drone maneuver
Sixteen teams from Chinese Universities showed how intelligent their drones were in tasks including self-localization, environment perception and object recognition in a competition held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Saturday.
The SJTUAV Intellisense Competition, the second of its kind, attracted more than 30 teams to compete in the online simulated version first. Then 16 winners participated in the final on spot on Saturday.
The competition requires each team to identify nine checkpoints, landing on them or flying through iron hoops, and find five QR codes among 10 pillars within 10 minutes.
Students can buy drones and related devices, such as cameras and sensors, but they must write the programming by themselves.
A team from Zhejiang University won the first prize with award of 50,000 yuan. The two following-up teams were from Shanghai Jiao Tong and East China University of Science and Technology.
Zou Danping, a researcher at Jiao Tong and one of the creators of the competition, said the competition test not about how fast the unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) could fly, but how smart they were in navigation and recognition with algorithms created by their owners.
He said the main bottle neck for the development of UVAs and their applications were technologies to make the chips as small as possible while as capable as possible in computing.
“Technologies are developing fast and maybe two years later, many teams can finish the current tasks in a few seconds,” he said.
The competition was gaining popularity among university students, including many doctoral and master students, who love researching on drone technologies.
The competition had about 20 teams at the preliminary contest last year and 10 made into the final.
