Hi Everyone.

UAV Challenge Medical Express is a competition where teams from around the world build UAVs in order to retrieve a Blood sample from Outback Joe, a sick farmer in the countryside of Queensland, Australia. It is considered to be the world's toughest drone competition.

Team Aero BMSCE is a group of Engineering Students from B.M.S. College of Engineering, Bengaluru. We received a GO Decision from the Organizers at UAVC after the first deliverable was submitted. We now have until April 11, 2018, to submit our Second Deliverable which is a detailed technical report, and a video demonstrating autonomous flight capability.

I started this thread to log our progress, and to take help from the RCI Community when we face some problems.

The Problem Statement:

Outback Joe is at his property in remote Queensland, Australia and has been feeling unwell. He has had a remote consultation with his doctor using video conferencing, and his doctor has requested some blood tests be done as soon as possible. Joe is well prepared, has a home sample taking kit, and has taken his blood sample. The challenge is now to get the blood sample to the lab. Joe's property is very remote and to make matters worse, it has been cut off by floodwaters.

Teams are invited to attempt to retrieve a blood sample from the remote Outback Joe and return it to base where medical staff will be waiting to analyse it. Teams are encouraged to develop systems that can carry out the mission in a fully autonomous manner using Type 2 Autonomy.

Deliverables
Entrants are required to submit a short technical report (known as Deliverable 1) that describes the proposed system design and safety considerations. Later a more detailed technical report is required (Deliverable 2) that outlines a team's design approach, methodology for remote landing, and operational and safety procedures along with a flight demonstration video was submitted.  Finally an Autonomous Flight Record that documented a minimum of five hours of autonomous flight has to be provided along with a Safety Case document (Deliverable 3). The top-twenty teams that pass the Deliverable 3 checkpoint will be invited to the competition.

Scoring
Points will be awarded based on the mission performance including the accuracy of the remote landing, technical documentation, and the team's answers to questions from the judges prior to the mission.

Prizes
The team to achieve the highest points total and have also completed the mission, and after the competition is complete, will be declared the winner and will receive AUD$ 25,000.

If the winning team has completed the mission using Type 2 Autonomy then they will receive a bonus of AUD$25,000.

If the winning team also completes the mission containing Dynamic No Fly Zones they will receive an additional bonus of AUD$25,000.

The maximum prize for the winning team is therefore AUD$75,000.

The team achieving the highest points total, whether or not they have completed the mission, will be awarded the Rod Walker Trophy, presented in memory of Professor Rod Walker, co-founder of the UAV Challenge.

The detailed rules and requirements can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5JgqjkRDqw8bDl5Q1p6Mzd3TlU/view

All the best Topalle. I hope you succeed. You sparked my interest when you first posted about this and since then I have been researching and reading up a lot on UAV/UAS technology and stuff. Thank you.

Regards,
Nitesh.

@topalle

Hi Srinivas,
You've probably seen this. If not, it's worth a look for preliminary ideas.
https://pixhawk.org/platforms/vtol/fun_cub_quad_vtol

Best of luck.

Besides the build log, consider sharing your ideas/ thoughts (if not confidential ) as your project proceeds. May interest many members!

You have also probably seen this one already but this is also a VTOL aircraft with an hybrid propulsion system.

http://www.altiuas.com

Lovely modern aircraft in link posted by Nitesh.

In 2003, Dr Maynard Hill did a 40 hour, 1900km transatlantic flight!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm

Engine was an OS 61 (10cc), with the carb from an OS Pet 10 (1.5cc)
Fuel consumption about 1ml per minute! (About 1/20 of the normal rate in a 60 size model!)

You can check out a diesel model engine to compare its milage with a glow engine

Have you shortlisted any basic parameters yet? Like size, weight, etc?

Thanks for the inputs Nitesh and Iyer sir.
We are completely self funded, other than a few materials and spare parts from the college.
We we're intitally planning to go for a hybrid VTOL Pusher, but now we are looking at an all electric aircraft with 5Kg MTOW.

XUAV Talon is one airframe that we are considering buying in order to speed up the development and Remove the variable of error caused by us building the aircraft.
The Kit costs around 8800 Rupees on Banggood.com but I don't have any idea if we will be able to import it without customs issues.

http://mozzie.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Overview.html#

This is a guide on how to convert the XUAV Mini Talon to a VTOL for the UAV Challenge Medical Express.

We are planning to go for the larger 1700+mm wingspan version of the XUAV Talon. We might add wing extensions to increase the span to 2000mm too. Because of the added weight of the VTOL motors, and batteries needed for them.

I was going through the exact guide today and was going to post it as well. Very interesting. You can check on rcbazaar. There are a few other models in stock which might serve your purpose.

All the best,
Nitesh.

We Have a Paragon Trainer (0.46 size) lying unused with us, so I was wondering what would be the challenges in converting that to a VTOL Long Range UAV.
Any Inputs?

Other than that, if we were to go for a XUAV Mini Talon, the cost breakdown would be something like this
1) Bare Airframe - 5000
2) Motors - 6000
3) ESCs - Available in stock with us
4) Batteries -  8000-10000
5) Flight Controller - 6000
6) Servos and Props- Available in stock
7) Radio Links - 5000-8000
8 ) Raspberry Pi - Available with us.
9) GoPro - Available with us.

All this is for one aircraft, and if we crash, which we definitely will, we will have to replace components, which would drive up the cost.

BTW, as a part of the procedure for getting a stall at MakerFaire Bengaluru, we made a video with a demo model showing how a VTOL aircraft would look, and we used the Paragon Trainer itself.

Check it out here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDO8k0-09fkYN8Sg-TZVjhGV99cZg0M4/view?usp=sharing

Narration by my friend

The Paragon Trainer is a 0.46 ~ 0.55 size trainer.
It has a Wing Area of 44.3 dm2 and recommended Wing Loading of 65g/dm2
Which means, the Total weight would be around 2.8 KG

Assuming 150W per KG as the Power, We need 336W of Power.
We have an Avionic c3536 1100kv Motor with us.
Considering a 4S 10000 mAH LiPo Battery, We can get a maximum of 595 W of power with a 9x4.5 Prop according to the specifications. and Thrust would be 2KG

Assuming you overcome the hardware limitation of flying it for the required duration with the required payload, how do you plan to handle the software side? The image recognition software and the mission planning? What radio modem do you plan to use? Are you going to use a companion computer? What Autopilot software are you going to use? Do you have programmers on your team?

All the best
Nitesh.

This means that the stall speed is around 45kmph

So, we can assume Cruise Speed = ~ 70kmph, (Slower than we need, because we need a cruise speed of around 90-100kmph to complete the mission within time)

@rcrcnitesh

We plan on using a Raspberry Pi to do the machine vision part (Recognizing the pattern and Geotagging). We have tested the code at small heights, with a GoPro and a laptop running python. We are yet to test it with a Raspberry Pi. It seems achievable because others have done it.

The Autopilot will be ArduPilot. We have a couple of Programmers on our team. But one great thing about being in college is that you have this pool of 4000 students out of which you'll find someone to help you out if your team can't figure it out!

We Plan on using a 900MHz Telemetry Radio, but not sure about it. We are yet to take a decision on it.

Can someone help me out with figuring out how much thrust will be required during cruise? This will help determine amp draw during cruise and endurance.

I used eCalc to find a suitable motor, ESC, Prop combination and turns out the Paragon isn't a good aircraft for this mission.
It is heavy at 1.5kg empty weight without any electronics and just adding batteries would cross the recommended weight of 2.8 kg

So, We have to Design a new plane or go for the XUAV Mini Talon

What about scratch building a wing with EPP foam? Check out this video.



This is a pretty basic version but he builds a much more advanced version later.



All the best
Nitesh.

We got confirmation of our stall at Maker Faire Bengaluru!
Whoever is in Bengaluru, attend Maker Faire!
It's on the 17th and 18th of November 2017, at Bangalore Palace
It's going to be awesome!
While you are there, come say hi
I'll update the stall number once I get it.

Bro could you tell more about the pattern recognition and object Avoidance?

OpenCV and OpenMV are your answers. If you google all that you'll find the answers. DIYDrones, Ardupilot.org and many other websites. Really helpful.

Regards
Nitesh

I'll give you a detailed answer tomorrow after my last exam
Incompressible Fluid Dynamics 😂

Lol

After one month of placing the order, we finally received the Pixhawk flight Controller from Bangood.com.
Initially, we will try to use it on a sky-surfer, which we have with us, then once we are satisfied by its performance, it will be converted to VTOL.
After both of those work successfully, we would buy a XUAV Mini Talon for the final aircraft.

Till now, we have only completed the pattern recognition and geotagging, from a quadcopter. We are using a cheap 1080p action camera and a Raspberry Pi for this purpose.