Outback Challenge first two casualties, first two successes

Team Rocky and Rescue Robotics have confirmed that they are out. A shame, still it will give them longer to prepare for next year. Monday seems to happen three days earlier in Australia than here!

Dear Team Rocky

The UAV Challenge Technical Committee has now met and I am afraid that I have to inform you that your entry to the Search and Rescue Challenge did not pass the Deliverable 2 check-point, and your journey in the 2010 UAV Challenge is at an end.

The reason(s) the committee reached this No-go decision are as follows:

1. You failed to address the simultaneous failure of GPS and the Communications link. This is outlined in Section 5.5.2.1 and Section 5.5.4 of the Rules where it states (in bold and underlined) that:

“If there is a loss of GPS while experiencing a loss of data link, the flight termination (Section 5.6) will be activated immediately.”

We could not find in your document where you addressed this critical issue.

If you feel that we have missed an explanation of how you address this issue in your D2 document then please point this out to us immediately.

2. You did not address loss of engine power.

3. You did not address a loss of GPS.

4. You did not provide data on drift under parachute as required under Rules 5.6.1

We thank you for your entry, encourage you to learn from this experience and to enter future UAV Challenge events. We also encourage you to come to Kingaroy anyway, watch the competition and gain some valuable experience to help you in future entries. The Technical Team are more than happy to talk with you at the Challenge event.

We wish you well in your engineering endeavours.

Regards

UAV Challenge Technical Committee

Congratulations to Latitude 38S and Melbourne UAV both teams made it through the deliverable two phase.

More to follow as it unfolds.