Category Archives: Competition

ENAC Team wins at IMAV2022

February 22, 2023 Gautier Hattenberger

The International Conference and Competition on MAV was organized by TUDelft mid-September 2022. The ENAC took part to the outdoor competition, a package delivery challenge, with several multi-rotors and a hybrid tail-sitter, all powered by Paparazzi.

They won the competition with a quite large amount of points. Nevertheless, all teams performed well with some innovative platforms.

Several papers have been presented to the conference by the ENAC team and the other participants. The proceedings are freely available on the conference website.

Competition, Events

Paparazzi wins at IMAV2018

November 28, 2018 Gautier Hattenberger

Enac UAV team and TUDelft MAVLAB team took part to the IMAV2018 conference and competition in Australia with great success!

For the first time, the two academic lead developers of the Paparazzi UAV system join efforts to participate to the Outdoor competition and won this event far ahead.

Several tasks have been completed, including a mapping (performed using OpenDroneMap) of the flight area with automatic detection of hazards hidden in the field (with a light fixed wing aircraft) and an autonomous obstacles avoidance navigation near trees (with Bebop2 + SlamDunk from Parrot).

During the Indoor event, Enac and TUDelft were competing. And if Enac finally won the competition regarding to the score with ultra light modified CX10 quadcopters, TUDelft made an outstanding demonstration of the Delfly Nimble. This small flapping wing UAV has an amazing agility and autonomous vision-based navigation, recognized with the Indoor Innovation prize.

All these success have been possible thanks to the hard work of the Paparazzi community over the past 15 years of course, but also thanks to many other Open-Source projects including:

OpenDroneMap
ChibiOS
OpenCV
Linux, GCC and others 🙂

For the hardware parts:

3D printing of the plane fuselage using Markforged printer
Embedded camera uEye IDS
Embedded processor NanoPi Neo Air
Autopilot Apogee and Lisa/MXS
Parrot Bebop2 and SlamDunk

The conference papers can be found here: http://www.imavs.org/imav2018-proceedings/, including several papers presented by Enac and TUDelft teams.

Thanks to everyone and see you next year in Spain !

Community, Competition, Events, Research

IMAV2016

October 24, 2016 Gautier Hattenberger

The International Micro-Air Vehicle Conference and Competition was held last week in Beijing, China, organized by the Beijing Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore.

As usual, the level of the teams involved in the competition is higher year after year and we had a great show. The team from the MAVLAB of TUDelft was participating to both indoor and outdoor session. During the outdoor, they unfortunately couldn’t show their best due to many communication issues, preventing them to fully use their RTK Bebop2 (and also some regressions in Paparazzi code, hum hum… 🙁 ).

The next day, the indoor team did its best to perform well. And despite the difficult tasks to pick up and drop objects, they tried hard until the end. It was worth the effort as they reached the 3rd place of the competition, a few points ahead the Spanish team of Madrid (CVG-UPM)! We could almost call it a draw as both team really did their best with great spirit.

But, this was not their only great achievement. The paper Control of a hybrid helicopter with wings by Christophe De Wagter and Ewoud Smeur received the Best Paper Award of the conference for their work on the control issues raised by the novel design of the Delftacopter and the solution they found to solve them. Congratulation to them and all the team involved in the Delftacopter!

Community, Competition, Hardware, Software, Videos

DELFTACOPTER – Hybrid Drone on a Mission

September 20, 2016 Rich Burton

DELFTACOPTER, an electric, long range, transitioning autonomous delta-wing helicopter, is on a mission. What mission? In this case, it’s the 2016 Outback Medical Express challenge and the MAVLab Team at TUDelft has high hopes for their hybrid aircraft.

This year’s Outback Medical Express mission requires a UAV to pick up and bring back a blood sample of an ill-fated person called “Outback Joe” located at an inaccessible roughly known location 30 kilometer away remote location with unknown terrain.

Powered by PaparazziUAV, the DELFTACOPTER is also equipped with state of the art on-board stereoscopic wide field of view computer vision.

Property description	Value
Flight
Cruise speed	45 knots at 300 watt
Most efficient speed	35 knots at 230 watt
Maximum speed	50 knots
Physical
Weight	4kg
MTOW	4,5kg
Wing area	0,496 m2
Wing loading	8kg/m2
Span	1,54m
Length	0,6 m
Height	0,4m
Energy
Power usage in hover	280 watt
Main battery energy	10000mAh ~ 225 Wh
FTS battery energy	250mAh ~ 2Wh
RPM in forward flight	450 rpm
RPM in hovering flight	1550 rpm
Datalink
Datalink 1 protocol	Iridium satellite communication
Datalink 1 range	Global
Datalink 2 protocol	900 MHZ long range communication
Datalink 2 range	40km
Weather properties
Maximum wind speed	30kts
Maximum precipitation	Light rain

All the best to the MAVLab Team and their DELFTACOPTER during their Outback Challenge adventures.

Community, Competition, Events

IMAV 2015 Competition

September 5, 2015 paparazzi

This year‘s International Micro Air Vehicles Conference and Flight Competition (IMAV 2015) is organized by the Institute of Flight
System Dynamics of the RWTH Aachen University and the
German Institute of Navigation. It takes place in Aachen, Germany from September 15 – 18, 2015. If you are in the area, you should check out the event.

IMAV is a yearly event that combines a diversified scientific conference with a technological competition involving Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Such a combination allows research groups from all over the world to share their knowledge, and stimulates them to focus on research that can be used in real life scenarios. Every year the competition scenarios become more advanced and more extensive. However, competitors are given the opportunity to either do complete missions, or to focus on sub-elements of the mission scenario.

The 2015 competition will consist of both an outdoor and an indoor part. The focus is put on the following tasks: surveillance, recognition, logisitics, precise maneuvering in combination with endurance.

Community, Competition, Events, Videos

TU Delft Student Challenge 2015

May 27, 2015 Danika Esden-Tempski

Students at the TU Delft MavLab compete with ARDrones running Paparazzi to fly seamlessly around obstacles without injuring the aircraft. The object to autonomously avoid all obstacles. This is a fantastic demonstration of the flexibility of the Paparazzi system and its ability to fly accurately around waypoints.

Community, Competition, Events, Hardware, Research, Talk, Videos

IMAV 2014 Recap

August 16, 2014 Piotr Esden-Tempski

IMAV 2014 was a great experience this year. If you don’t know what it is, its a micro air vehicle competition and conference that was held in Delft, Netherlands.

During the three days of the conference, there were many very interesting talks and presentations as well as an incredible showcase of research talent during the competition. Here is a playlist of the talks, they can be found on the TU Delft MAVlab YouTube channel.

One talk we wanted to highlight was presented by Gautier Hattenberger from ENAC, he is also one of the core developers of Paparazzi UAV. He gave a very interesting talk highlighting the use of the Paparazzi UAV framework in autonomous aerial robot research.

Bart Remes gave a presentation on the Paparazzi UAV Lisa/S and nano Quadcopters. If you are interested in the technical side of the hardware you will definitely enjoy his talk.

If you were curious about the results of the competition, the first place was taken by a Singapore team with a great fleet of high tech quadcopters. The second place went to a German team led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus-Peter Neitzke that flew completely FPV and the third place went to our friends at ENAC flying Paparazzi powered quadcopters and airplanes. They also created the most usable and complete aerial maps of the village.

And finally we have to thank Bart Remes and the TU-Delft MavLab team that made the whole event possible.

Community, Competition, Events, Research, Talk, Videos

IMAV 2014 Live Streams

August 12, 2014 paparazzi

The Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is proud the present the 2014 International Micro Air Vehicle Conference (IMAV 2014), now offering the possibility of attending the conference by live stream free-of-cost. The live stream will support most platforms showing innovative keynotes of pioneers in the industry as well as the current state-of-the-art presented by many researchers working on MAV’s. The schedule is published on the website of the conference.
Tuesday, August 12th, 2014

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

Friday, August 15th, 2014

Community, Competition, Events

IMAV 2013

September 20, 2013 Piotr Esden-Tempski

The MavLab team of TU Delft consisted of 12 people coming from aerospace, computer science, embedded programming and artificial intelligence. Thanks to the enormous team efforts in the last months, the team has won prizes in all the categories in which it participated at IMAV 2013 in Toulouse, France:

Outdoor: 1st place

With an autonomous swarm of 12 MAVs operated by a single operator. The MAVs only had to be plugged in and started with their own flight plan, while the operator could monitor their mission status and intervene where necessary. Our participation featured four main innovations: (1) a single operator for 12 MAVs, 3 hybrid UAVs, 7 Parrot AR drones and 2 mini-quadrotors, (2) onboard vision processing on the AR drone with Paparazzi, (3) hybrid UAVs able to fly under any attitude, and (4) the world’s smallest open source autopilot, Lisa/S (2 grams). The wind conditions were terrible on the outdoor competition day, with 6 Bft, and most teams had their MAVs blown away. Everybody was impressed with how the hybrid UAVs were able to cope nicely with these conditions and were still able to perform a precision landing.

Indoor Operations: 1st place

Indoor Autonomy: 3rd place

Indoor the mission consisted of elements such as flying through a window and obstacle zone. We were the only participants to use a flapping wing MAV, which was in size and weight by far the smallest competing MAV (28 cm wing span, 20g). We demonstrated some autonomous flight capabilities such as autonomous takeoff (a world’s first), and the capabilities of the DelFly as a First Person View-platform, where the operator flies the MAV on the basis of its onboard images. All elements were performed by the operator. Many thanks to ENAC for organizing the event in Toulouse.

Community, Competition, Events, Hardware, Software

ATMOS Hybrid UAV

July 6, 2012 paparazzi

ATMOS, a hybrid airplane-quadrotor developed at the MavLab of TU-Delft, was awarded third place (out of 140) in the UAVForge Competition. There were more than 140 initial contestants and after several selection rounds with only 12 finalists, the paparazzi Lisa/M powered ATMOS was one of the few that could actually make it to the remote target site miles away in an RF unfriendly environment. No team fully completed the baseline objectives which is why no prices were issued. The vertical takeoff and landing, together with long range thanks to the wing and flexibility thanks to open-source paparazzi were key factors in this event [1].

But probably more important, the development of ATMOS has added a new code-base to paparazzi to enable the control of any hybrid multi-lifting device vehicle. ATMOS can take-off vertically as a quadrotor, transition to full forward flight as an airplane but also fly in any intermediate transition stage fully autonomously. So let your imagination go wild!

Paparazzi UAV Blog