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.

Unfortunately, Triton UAS was not able to attend the AUVSI SUAS competition this year because our airframe crashed too close to the competition deadlines. Even though the team did not attend the competition this year, we did submit a technical design paper which includes a full description of the airframe we were planning to compete with.

Despite this setback, we learned several valuable lessons that will allow us to perform better in future years. The most important takeaway from this year is that our team needs to have a backup airframe ready for competition when testing the primary airframe so we can quickly recover from damage to the plane.

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.

After a year of hard work the UCSD AUVSI team went to Maryland with our backup plane to compete and to show off the work we accomplished during the school year. The competition pits 30 schools from around the world During the mission demonstration we were able to fly and complete image reconnaissance. Even when losing GPS lock during flight we were able to continue flying and complete the mission. The flight was a good learning experience on what we need to do in the future to be able to adapt to different mission configurations such as very large obstacles.