Borrow a Parrot ARdrone for IMAV 2011

An initiative from the makers of the ARdrone, Parrot will put the cat amongst the pigeons in the competition world. Will other manufacturers follow suit and lend equipment to cash strapped students?

Want to borrow an iDrone, read on.

Missions

The IMAV 2011 has four distinct competitions, all of which have a scoring mechanism that especially reward autonomously flying MAVs. Please note that only autonomous flight and video-based flight are allowed in the competitions: manual flight via RC is only allowed as a tech demo of a novel MAV platform / concept.

The preliminary competition rules can be found below.

Borrowing a Parrot AR Drone

For the first time in the history of the IMAV events, teams can apply for borrowing an MAV platform for use in the competitions. The IMAV 2011 Summer edition is sponsored by Parrot, the producer of the Parrot AR Drones. Parrot has made it possible for the IMAV organization to lend drones to teams that wish to focus on the artificial intelligence / software part of the competitions.

The AR drone is a quad rotor with multiple sensors onboard, including:

* Cameras looking to the front and bottom
* Ultrasound altimeter
* 3 axis accelerometer
* 2 axis gyrometer
* 1 axis yaw precision gyrometer

Teams can adapt the open source code of the Parrot AR drone to participate in the competitions (see http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/usa). It is required that the code developed by the team for the IMAV competitions will be open source as well.

The procedure for applying for borrowing a Parrot AR Drone:

1. Write a short plan for the competition(s) in which your team wants to participate. Send it to: microuav -at- gmail.com
2. The IMAV 2011 organization evaluates the incoming proposals and notifies the team whether it can borrow a Parrot AR Drone.
3. Register the team and its members for the competition(s) and the conference.
4. After payment of at least two team members, and acceptance of the conditions for borrowing the platform, the Parrot AR Drone will be sent. As a preliminary indication for the conference registration costs, a student pays only 150 Euro for the entire conference / competition, including conference dinner ticket.

Please note that the NUMBER OF DRONES IS LIMITED, and we will assign them on a first-come first-serve basis, if the quality of the proposals is sufficiently high.

Team registration

Teams should be registered at least one month before the conference starts. If the team does not borrow a Parrot AR Drone, there are no hard deadlines for team registration. However, it is important to note that COMPETITION PLACES ARE LIMITED: the online team registration will be stopped if the maximum number of places is reached. The online team registration will be opened in 2011.