Thales Announces Project Arduino Winners

Project Arduino, now in its fourth year, challenges engineering students to use their skills to create a Thales-inspired Arduino based concept and video. After an extremely tough competition this year, the name of the winning team was announced live on YouTube and Sina Weibo.

This year Project Arduino was bigger than ever before, 47 universities across China (including Hong Kong), France, Netherlands, Singapore, UK and USA participated in the competition. Over 1000 students applied to take part and in total 524 students participated in 103 different teams.  The students were given the challenge to create a Thales-inspired project and video, using Arduino, and this year the quality of the projects was exceptional.

After an extremely tough competition, the top seven projects from all seven regions participating selected their best team to represent them in a public vote on www.thalesarduino.com. The top three videos with the most votes were then put before a jury of Thales experts to decide who would win a trip to a Thales Research Centre in one of the regions participating and be crowned global winners of Project Arduino 2016/17!

The three teams selected to go to the jury stage were:

Team Droneshell (USA)

Solar-powered drone landing platform, designed to service autonomous delivery and reconnaissance drones in remote locations.

Team Cube Li (China Mainland)

A wireless system to detect the location of a fault on traction networks that provide the electrical supply to an electric rail network. Detecting these faults wirelessly allows staff to maintain the network more efficiently.

Team DSD (France)

A device to measure mental alertness in situations that require long periods of concentration such as flying aircraft.
After much deliberation, the jury selected Team Droneshell as their global winners of Project Arduino 2016/17, with the name of the winning team being revealed on Youtube Live and Sina Weibo on 21st March 2017.

The Jury’s Choice

DroneShell were chosen as the global winners as they skilfully applied their knowledge of Thales to design and develop a solar-powered drone landing platform, designed to service autonomous delivery and reconnaissance drones in remote locations, which could be applicable to our work in Smart Cities and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). The jury was particularly impressed by the amount of thought that had gone into the reliability and redundancy of the project during operation, which demonstrated the maturity of the idea and that it was a complete solution. They also liked how they incorporated software, hardware and mechanical engineering which were well presented in their very engaging video.