Second Outdoor Autonomous Drone Racing Competition

The Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), calls for the Second Outdoor Autonomous Drone Race Competition, which will take place on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, as part of the activities of the International Workshop on Intelligent Drones. The competition will be held at the INAOE facilities, located at 1 Luis Enrique Erro Street, Santa María Tonantzintla, in San Andrés Cholula, in the state of Puebla.

Who can participate?
Teams of up to 5 members may participate, whose members are assigned to a Higher Education Institution or a Public Research Center. Teams can be mixed, made up of students and/or professors/researchers.

About the competition.
Teams must present a quadcopter-type drone that can be commercial, assembled or of their own design, which can fly autonomously through a circuit of windows that will be placed in an outdoor environment.

The drone must measure up to 50 cm in diameter considering the tip of the diagonal propeller.

Processing can be on board or performed via a ground control station. A special prize will be awarded to the team that demonstrates the best performance with onboard processing.

There are no restrictions on programming language, number of sensors on board the vehicle or processing cards.

The drone must fly autonomously and to do so, the team will be able to use the takeoff and start commands to begin autonomous navigation, as well as manual landing when it is decided to end the flight. Once autonomous flight has begun, any manual operation by the pilot will end the flight and the drone must be landed manually. It will be checked that the team always has the option to interrupt autonomous flight to switch to manual flight, in case the judges request intervention.

The winning team will be the one that crosses the most windows. In case of a tie, the winning team will be the one that has crossed the windows the fastest.

All windows will have the following dimensions:

The take-off point will always be the same and will be known to all participants before the competition begins.

A table with electric power will be placed near the take-off point for the team in turn to place their equipment. It is not permitted to add any other type of hardware, device or any other object inside the runway or on the windows.

The race track will be placed on the garden of the INAOE information centre. An area of ​​approximately 20 square metres will be used. Between 10 and 15 windows will be placed if space allows. This video exemplifies a partial view of a possible track with the windows that will be used for the competition.

There will be one single mode: sailing in a circuit of windows where, when leaving one window, the other window will not necessarily be visible. The position of the windows will have slight variations to the circuit for training.

Registration.
To participate in the competition, each team member must register for the workshop following the instructions indicated in the Non-Author Registration section.

For more information, write to: tndi@ccc.inaoep.mx

IMPORTANT:
Those teams interested in participating in the competition will be able to attend the institute from Sunday 20th to Monday 21st to perform tests with a limited number of windows from 9 am to 5 pm. To do so, it is important that they first register so that they can be given a QR code and thus be allowed access to the institute. To enter the drone and computer (laptop), they must register them at the security booth. Preferably, they must show the serial number of the drone and some other information that allows it to be identified.