Triton UAS’ Winter Quarter was filled with significant milestones for both our project and outreach efforts, such as the maiden flight and tuning of our main flight platform, the Swallow, and various outreach events throughout the quarter.

Triton UAS was involved in several outreach opportunities with the local and UC San Diego community. The quarter started with new member recruitment at the Winter Engineers on the Green. This was the first opportunity of the quarter to recruit fellow students to our project. Triton UAS continued outreach efforts with a presentation to the students at High Tech High Chula Vista about our organization and project. Leads Andrew Fletcher and José Orozco explained how we develop our year-long project and answered questions about us, our project, and UC San Diego. We also participated in the SWE Envision Project Fair, where we tabled alongside other UC San Diego project organizations and introduced our project to visiting high school girls from the San Diego area.

Triton UAS is off to a fresh start this year with new members and new leadership. The airframe subteam has worked on and made progress on the unmanned ground vehicle, and rebuilding the main airframe, Fiber One. The embedded team has been hard at work on the antenna tracker as well as the signal and power sister boards. The airframe and embedded team have worked jointly on outfitting and wiring the backup airframe, Swallow, for a maiden flight in the beginning of Winter quarter. The software team worked on generating artificial targets, a user interface for the path planner, and interfacing with the judging server.

The Triton UAS team has accomplished several goals during the 2018–2019 school year. We have made significant progress in refining the structure and algorithms in our software, making it more robust and extensible. Our embedded team has been hard at work adding new features to our electronics to improve the power system and the communication systems. Finally, we have added new features to our flight platform in order to handle both new and old challenges. With these additions and improvements, we are entering the 2019–2020 year prepared and eager to excel at all the challenges of the SUAS competition.

After 2018 competition in the spring, the software, embedded, and airframe subteams have been hard at work improving upon our experience from the 2017–2018 school year. Here’s an update from each of our teams:

Software

With the removal of moving obstacles from this year’s competition rules, the software team can now reallocate energy to mission tasks such as object detection, localization, and classification as well as stationary obstacle avoidance.

For computer vision tasks, we are working on implementing and training different machine learning models to determine the model with the highest accuracy. Some of the models we are implementing are Mask R-CNN and YOLOv3 to crop images around the targets. To train and test our models, we are making and taking aerial images of our own targets to collect data, and holding data labeling meetings for use of the data with the models.