Amazing, really amazing
Awesome work and well executed. Congrats on accomplishing the mission objectives and we look forward to seeing you there again next time!
Thanks for sharing
You and your team are truly inspiring, the challenge is a great demonstrator for both technological and developer’s community spirit. I like the part where you made a last minute change on the fence breach logic and distributed to all the other contestants, this is what we can really appreciate in ardupilot.org
Well earned and well deserved.
Thanks for the comprehensive write up.
Thank you Tridge for an excellent report. I will endeavor to provide a follow-up on the GX9 and crash. For now evidence is strongly pointing to a possible engine heat soak condition but this was not due to a lean mixture or fuel blockage. Measured fuel consumption to historical data, rpm versus throttle analysis and pre-flight carburetor setup all show we had a richer mixture than normal for the area of operation. More on this later. I am still validating another possibly and will be flight testing the GX9 this weekend. Thankfully the aircraft descent rate was partially retarded by drag from the main rotor, and a newly designed landing gear did a good job of protecting the fuselage.
ok, thanks Greg, I look fwd to it flying again!
Amazing work. loved reading this
good job guys, staying ahead of all.
Great debrief, looked like you did really well. You say you have to go relatively fast for long periods due to the distances and time constraints. I see you were cruising at around 50 knots, what sort of speeds were some of the other contestants cruising at?
Hi Justin
We were meant to be cruising at 50knots, but we done 65 knots instead, but that was on battery power not fuel. For the range and time allocated, it’s better to aim for the higher end of 50knots so you have enough time and reserves to complete the mission. Most teams needed to operate at the same speed to make it there and back in time, But from memory only three teams manged to get to the search area, and only the one aircraft from CUAV made it back intact. There is/was the option to go overtime at the expense of 2 points per minute but I don’t think anyone went overtime because most aircraft didn’t even make it back.
That’s really interesting what were the reasons for people not making it back? Lack of fuel/battery energy, or crashing?
Mostly in flight systems failures leading to “hard landings”, there were some pilot induced issues and some didn’t fly (far) because of bad weather. Others were failed launches. We didn’t crash, but our air speed sensor was on the fritz in flight, which led to us not making the corner in forward flight as stall protection kicked in and limited the turn authority, with us ending up on the wrong side of the fairly narrow geofence and landing in hover mode.
From memory, of the three that made it to the search area, one was a heli that had an engine fire, the other was the Delftacopter that landed in a tree because they underestimated the height of the Aussie trees in the area whilst they were searching for Joe (good job they already hired a cherry picker for their antennas!), and then CUAV returned to base with their fuel powered quadplane (with a imposing 10m altitude transition to land because they used more hover battery in the search area as expected), but they left the heli they were using as a RF relay, as a souvenir for Joe in the search area. (i’m not sure he was impressed with the fact it wasn’t delivered ready-to-fly tho!) 
We actually followed CUAV’s flight out and watched it at the search area from the road. We had trouble following it down the parallel road to the search are with the car. The porter was impressive to watch while it flew it’s search pattern, it seemed pretty close to the treeline, and it was doing some pretty radical maneuvers for such a large plane to scan the area. Sadly we didn’t see any of the others as we hadn’t flown ourselves yet. The Delftacopter was cool to watch whilst transitioning.
Sounds like fun!
Not sure you can do what CUAV did last year in the 2018. Don’t the rules only allow a single aircraft to launch? Though it can split in to two aircraft after launch. Or have I read the rules incorrectly?
Looking at giving it a go ourselves in 2018.
The rules did allow two aircraft in the air at once. We had one acting as a radio relay, while the other aircraft did the landing near Joe.
actually, both “landed” near joe. Just that only one was deliberate 
The 2018 rules also allow for two aircraft.
1 Like
Great! It was a very good idea to have the copter there as a relay station.
Have you ever considered doing your own custom air-frame?
Justin
I wouldn’t consider using a secondary aircraft just as a RF relay. There are many better options out there to maintain comms that don’t involve the risk of using yet another complex and prone to failure aircraft. Note CUAV still had comms ground to ground even after the “RF Relay” heli came down, otherwise they’d have not been able to takeoff from the remote landing area.
If you really wanted to run a second aircraft, consider using it only if comms fail, and by using it as a backup aircraft etc, or for doing the initial search and then synchronizing each flight to fit within the time limits and overtime penalties. There are many configuration optimizations that can be used, but overall the less complex and less aircraft, the least exposed to systems failure you are.