MAV 07 was yet another great success for the project! Paparazzi teams took 1^st, 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th places in the outdoor autonomous surveillance competition and were honored to share the 1^st place award with the very well designed Micropilot-equipped 48cm Ping Wing from Linköping University in Sweden.
The first Paparazzi helicopter, Twisted Logic proved that a passively stable helicopter could operate well in mild outdoor winds and also took 2^nd place in the indoor competition, surpassed only by the “Father of passively stable helicopters”, world famous Petter Muren of Proxflyer and BladeRunner fame.
The team of Christian Lindenberg and (fake) Martin Müller also won the special award from the jury for it general performance and fair spirit.

MAV 07 will be held in Toulouse, France (of course!) September 17-21, 2007. Expect to see lots of great Paparazzi systems kicking ass and taking names!

Two Paparazzi teams, ENAC/Miraterre and Martin Mueller/Christian Lindeberg won 2nd and 3rd place at the MAV06 competition in Sandestin, Florida. Unfortunately, both teams had insufficient video resolution to identify the 1.5m ground target
required for high-scoring and the winning prize went to Bringham Young University who was able to identify 2 of the 3 targets with a Panasonic KX-141 camera and an unusually narrow 30 degree FOV lens. The Bringham Young team used the Procerus Kestrel autopilot (originally developed at the university) and obviously practiced video target recognition much more than the rest of us.

Flight performance and navigation for both Dragon Slayers and the Black One was exceptional as usual. All planes performed flawless autonomous takeoffs and landings and the Slayer performed an
autonomous paintball drop with wind-corrected precision that put the ball within 3 meters of the designated target from an altitude of 40 meters in a 5 m/s wind. As luck would have it, the stress of
managing two aircraft from a single ground station during an intense competition, aggravated by a misbehaving GPS in one of the planes that required a power and flight-plan reset just prior to launch
resulted in us neglecting to re-input the target coordinates and the ball was dropped accurately on the default target location, not the actual target location provided by the judges just prior to flight.

-Five Paparazzi teams were in the six first places.

See the complete MAV06 Photo Gallery

See you next year in Toulouse, France for MAV07.

The EMAV06 competition took place in Braunschweig, Germany. All the teams were equipped with Paparazzi. With four Paparazzi teams winning four first places. ENAC took 3rd place in the “Fixed-Wing” category.

MAV05 took place in Garmisch, Germany. With three ENAC
Paparazzi teams taking the first three places in the competition.

EMAV04 took place in Braunscheweig, Germany. With the ENAC Paparazzi team taking the first place with a Microjet (0.65cm, 0.4kg).

Paparazzi was very successful at the JMD03 (Journées Micro Drones) competition/conference in Toulouse, France. The ENAC team won first place with a Twinstar  (1.4m, 1.4kg).