Georgia Tech's aerial robotics team flew circles around the competition literally over a three kilometer course to win the 2001 International Aerial Robotics Competition at Webster Field in Maryland. Tech's was the only robot to accomplish autonomous flight at the event sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Tech's team is made up of graduate and undergraduate students from Aeronautical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and the College of Computing.
"The goal was to build an autonomous robot that could fly three kilometer to a building of known GPS coordinates," faculty adviser Eric Johnson said. "The 9-foot wingspan aircraft a one-third scale model of a Piper Cub was the only vehicle in the contest that achieved the goal when Johnson explained that the competition is divided into four levels. Because Tech successfully achieved level one, the team will attempt level two next year, when the robot must find an opening and fly into the building. Levels three and four require the robot to photograph each room in the building, then return to the base.
Other schools that participated in the competition were North Carolina State University, Waterloo University (Canada), Purdue University, Southern Polytechnic State University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Simon Frazier University.