UMD wins 2014 MAV Student Competition
The University of Maryland Dolfins win the 2014 MAV student competition.
The student team from the University of Maryland brought home the gold from the second annual Micro-Air Vehicle student challenge held by AHS International, The Vertical Flight Technical Society.
The MAV student challenge competition was created to encourage hands-on engineering and problem solving, as well as introducing students to the development of autonomous flight control for VTOL systems. “The Society seeks to develop the skills for the next generation of vertical flight engineers, scientists and leaders,” said Mr. Ajay Sehgal, Wyle Aerospace Group Chief Engineer.
The MAV Student Challenge remains a difficult competition against very demanding requirements. Only four teams submitting proposals met the selection criteria. In addition to the University of Maryland team were teams from North Dakota State University, Penn State University, and Georgia Tech.
The UMd Dolphin MAV team won the competition and was the sole winner of the manually/remotely-executed challenge. They were the only team to complete, acceptably, all of the tasks and received the $2,500 prize in the Manual category.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g208q3AzyNo&feature=youtu.be]
Honorable mention awards were given to North Dakota State (manual), Penn State University and Georgia Tech (autonomous) to acknowledge the level of effort by each team in putting together an overall VTOL platform, onboard camera and computation, and ground station system for this very challenging competition.
Teams were awarded a total of $6,125 in prizes; the remainder of the $10,000 will be rolled into next year’s student challenge to be held at Virginia Beach, VA on 5 May 2015.
The Patuxent Partnership was among this year’s sponsors. In addition to The Patuxent Partnership, sponsors included Bell Helicopter, The Boeing Company, Pratt & Whitney Canada, and Sikorsky Aircraft.
For full details on the challenge, go to www.vtol.org/mav.
