UAV Team Reaped First Prize in 2015 International Aerial Robotics Competition

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) team of HKUST has won the First Prize in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) 2015 – Asia/Pacific Venue, which was held in Beijing from 5 to 8 Nov 2015..

In this competition, the UAV team has gone through 3 main challenges: First, they have to demonstrate navigation in an unknown environment with no external navigation aids or large stationary points of reference; second, demonstrate autonomous avoidance of moving obstacles; third, demonstrate interaction between aerial robots and moving targets.

The award-winning team is led by Prof Shaojie Shen, Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), followed by Ph.D. students Fei Gao and Tong Qin, M.Phil. students Jing Chen, Bing Li, Tianbo Liu, Kunyue Su and Zhenfei Yang and MPhil graduate Shuo Yang, all from ECE.

IARC is the longest running collegiate aerial robotics challenge in the world. Entering its third decade of advancing the state of the art in autonomous aerial robotic behavior, the competition continues to tackle challenges that are currently impossible for any flying robots owned by government or industry. Every year IARC is held concurrently at two venues, America and Asia/Pacific.