DRONES ARE GOING PLACES
High-flying students rule the air at a contest that rewards innovation in a booming industry. René Bruemmer drops in as projects — and budding careers — take off.
And so are the students unveiling their designs at a national competition. The market for unmanned aerial vehicles is skyrocketing and that means blue skies ahead for them, René Bruemmer reports.
One team flew their drone into a tree on the day of the national championships. And they weren’t even the least fortunate ones.
The day before the big meet, the team from the University of Manitoba, competing for their first time, suffered a “fly-away” in trial run testing, which is defined by people in the industry as “something you hope doesn’t happen to you.”
Team Manitoba’s drone flew up, looked fine, then pitched to one side and plummeted to the ground, losing one of its six propellers. Then things got worse. The hex copter suddenly started rising, out of control — 50 metres, 100 metres, 200 metres — with the student pilots unable to bring it back. It didn’t help that the competition was on an airfield. The copter lost another propeller. Finally the power was cut, sending months of hard work and thousands of dollars in investments crashing to Earth.
“Everyone was like ‘Wooooooh, damn, they’re not competing anymore,” said Alex Gouyet, vice-president of McGill University’s AERO drone club.
Such was the nature of highstakes brinkmanship at this year’s Student Unmanned Aerial System Competition, which pits the best in Canada’s university aeronautical design clubs against one another to see who has the greatest chops in drone design, strategy and control.
This year’s event was held in early May at the Centre d’Excellence sur les Drones airfield in Alma in Quebec’s Saguenay region. Fourteen teams from schools including the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and Université de Sherbrooke faced off at the competition organized by national industry association Unmanned Systems Canada to vie for bragging rights and potential careers.
Student competitors have been known to get job offers from industry executives and government officials who attend the event to scout new talent.
Once primarily the purview of the military and hobbyists, the market for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles — for everything from industrial inspections to monitoring crop health to real estate photography — is skyrocketing. The five-year market opportunity for drones has been forecast to hit $100-billion between 2016-20, according to Goldman Sachs. While the military remains the main purchaser, commercial and civil governmental use is growing rapidly.
Which is why the annual student competition features teams squaring off in real-life scenarios.
The event draws industry executives, sponsors and government officials looking for potential hires and to see what the brightest young minds are doing to advance technologies or develop new uses. Police forces go to see how theoretical applications can be put to real use. Businesses and governments come to see innovations that could be used to inspect large construction sites or pinpoint where forest fires are located.
Students who were once just teenagers with a passion for remote-controlled vehicles and a penchant for fiddling have become lucrative commodities.
Montreal soared at this year’s competition, with perennial powerhouse École de technologie supérieure taking first place, with a $7,000 prize, and McGill finishing second. It was the first time McGill’s drone club cracked the top five. They won $5,000, which will help to pay for expenses and recruit new members.
The competition, said Gouyet, the only management student among a team of electrical and mechanical engineering undergrads whose sole membership criteria is a love of drones, “was freakin’ hard.”
Despite their disaster, Team Manitoba, who had driven 26 hours from Winnipeg to attend, ended up winning the Pip Rudkin Memorial Award for Perseverance. On the day of the meet, they drove 240 kilometres to Quebec City to pick up spare parts, drove back and rebuilt their drone, but couldn’t get it airborne.
“They never gave up,” the judges noted.
Each year, teams are given tasks that mimic industrial, commercial or crime-fighting uses. Last year teams had to collect aerial footage of a simulated biker gang hangout and drop a payload the size of an egg onto a 10-centimetre target zone, with officials from the RCMP monitoring the proceedings.
This year students had to navigate their drones to a mock solar farm installation about a kilometre away, take an inventory of how many panels had been destroyed or damaged during a storm, and report back within 45 minutes.
The McGill team used two drones — one eight-kilogram, six-propeller hex copter named Carrier, capable of lugging a heavy high-definition camera, the other dubbed Recci (short for reconnaissance) that was more nimble, able to get in close, drop the payload and act as backup in case Carrier glitched. The flight operators navigating via live video feed had to be careful not to crash into each other. The drones had to fly in close enough to read clues typed out in 16-point font, and transfer a package onto a Velcro-covered receiving pad.
If their radio frequencies cut out, the drones were computer programmed to complete the reconnaissance task on their own, flying by GPS co-ordinates.
McGill scored high in part due to their rigorous pre-flight preparation and professionalism, which garnered extra points.
In the months before the meet, they practised repeatedly on a frozen airstrip surrounded by open fields on Île-Perrot off the western tip of Montreal, shivering in the rain to run through possible scenarios “10 times each.” They honed their flying and visual imagery skills on miniature aircraft spliced together from spare parts and cannibalized drones, and topped with GoPro cameras. They made sure their computer program failsafes would fly their mini-copters automatically in the event of a radio-frequency breakdown.
For Adrian Wang, 19, who came to McGill from Harbin, China two years ago to study electrical engineering, the club has become the perfect marriage of hobby and academics.
“There are so many similarities to my major, and so many practical applications of the science,” he said.
California native Alex Gouyet, 20, caught the bug as a senior in high school when his father bought him a nano drone that fit in the palm of his hand.
“I put it together, started to fly it and something activated in my brain,” he remembered. “And I said: ‘This is the coolest thing ever.’ ”
During a gap year away from school, Gouyet spent time volunteering on farms in Alabama and Montana, sometimes using his drones to herd sheep and goats, which feared the buzzing aerial beasts.
Another stint at a vineyard in France taught him a love of the land and, combined with McGill management school’s mantra of making the world a better place, gave him his future goal: creating a company that will send drones flying low over farmers’ fields and use computer software to check the health of crops in a matter of minutes, a growth industry in the drone world.
In a few months, he’s going to Kenya to work on a project to foil poachers using drones to track game.
Two weeks after the competition, the young flyers of McGill’s Aero Club were back at the windswept fields of Île-Perrot, their eyes to the skies, testing Carrier and Recci and plotting strategy for next year’s competition.
Once the work was done, they raced their own personal drones, souped-up aerial hot rods that can hit 100 kilometres an hour.
“Racing is definitely the most fun you can have with a drone,” Gouyet said. “Especially five people, five drones following each other in formation — your life peaks when that happens.”
I put it together, started to fly it, and something activated in my brain. And I said: ‘This is the coolest thing ever.’