A student award, named in honour of co-founder of the UAV Challenge, the late Professor Rod Walker, was announced this week. The award aims to encourage students that share Rod’s passion for the use of unmanned aircraft in civilian applications. Ben Barnes from University of Technology, Sydney won the Advancement of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems award and a $2500 prize for developing a way to give quadcopters vision without using global positioning systems (GPS). Full details here.

Double Duo, a team from the MUROC flying club at Mueller, Queensland, has won the 2015 Airborne Delivery Challenge. It was a very tight contest in the end with just 1.1 points between first and second. Double Duo won $5,000 and were one of the only teams to successfully drop three packages to Outback Joe and have packages land with a shock under 75G. In second place was Par Hexellence, with their hexcopter. They earned many of their flying points by autonomously dropping their EpiPen payload. The Robotic Delivery Challenge prize was not awarded this year as no team managed a successful drop within 10m of the target spot. Team photos will be posted in the coming weeks as will stories of this UAV Challenge event. The organisers would like to thank the teams for the great spirit in which they competed and the event sponsors for their continued support.

The first day of the 2015 high-school UAV Challenge has been completed. Today was a day where the teams presented to the judges and also showed the scrutineers that their aircraft are safe to fly and that they have a safe backup pilot as part of their team. There are 17 teams taking part and all teams presented well and passed their static scrutineering. Half the teams had passed flight scrutineering when a series of storms forced the day to be be shortened. Teams will come back tomorrow bright and early, finish flight scrutineering and then start the competition flying. At this stage we are predicting that we will use the Adverse Weather Day on Thursday. More storms are predicted for tomorrow.

The second storm cell of the afternoon.

We are now only two days away from the start of the 2015 High-School UAV Challenge. This year the high-school events are being held at Gratton Field, Bourkes Road West, Calvert (close to Ipswich) from Tue 29September. Please go to the High-School page for full details.

The Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group is part of Australia’s Department of Defence. It is the second largest public-funded R&D organisation in Australia. DST Group has been a sponsor of the UAV Challenge for many years and we are very excited that they will again sponsor in 2015 and 2016.

We are delighted to announce that Northrop Grumman will be a Platinum Sponsor for the 2015 and 2016 UAV Challenge events. Northrop Grumman have been a supporter of the UAV Challenge since 2013. They are focusing resources on education programs and partnerships, especially in the STEM areas. You can read about their exciting STEM activities here. Continuing our relationship with Northrop Grumman will keep the UAV Challenge strong and we are extremely excited to work with them again.

We are excited to announce that Insitu Pacific will be a Platinum Sponsor and Boeing Research & Technology Australia a Gold Sponsor for the 2015-2016 UAV Challenge High-School and Medical Express competitions. Both Insitu Pacific and Boeing have been constant sponsors and supporters of the UAV Challenge and have been critical to the success of the past events. Both organisations have supplied personnel to past Technical Committees, Judging teams and range marshals, as well as sponsorship. We welcome their continued commitment to our cause of getting UAVs into civilian applications that can save lives, while at the same time inspiring young entrants and hobbyists into thinking about careers in aerospace and remotely piloted aircraft. The Airmanship awards for both 2015 and 2016 will be known as the Insitu Pacific Airmanship Awards. See: http://insitupacific.com.au/ and http://www.boeing.com.au/.

Insitu Pacific’s Nigel Meadows (Chief Remote Pilot) awarding the 2014 Airmanship Award in the Search and Rescue Challenge

The UAV Challenge Technical Committee can report that they have completed their deliberations regarding the Deliverable 1 (D1) technical reports from the 2016 Medical Express teams. In total, 59 teams were given a Go decision and progress to the next phase of the competition. Well done to those teams and bad luck to those that did not make it through.

The UAV Challenge Technical Committee are now reading through the D1 documents of the 2016 Medical Express teams. The response to the new Medical Express mission has been global. Teams from 19 countries have entered: Armenia, Australia (24), Brazil, Canada (4), China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Kenya, India (10), Iran, Poland (3), Singapore, Spain, Switzerland (3), Thailand (2), The Netherlands, UK, USA (7).

The deadline has now passed for submitting Deliverable 1 documents to the 2016 UAV Challenge Medical Express. We received 64 D1 documents from teams from all over the world. The Technical Committee will now get to work reading through the documents and assessing teams for the Go/No-Go decision. This process is likely to take 2-3 weeks.