Welcome to MAAV’s Blog!

We are Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, a student-led engineering design team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For years we have been designing, building and programming autonomous aerial vehicles to compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC). We are incredibly excited about everything happening this year and look forward to sharing our experiences with you on Medium and on our official website, www.maavumich.org.

The IARC is a 22-year old competition that is on its seventh challenge. Since 1995, IARC has been designing challenges that are impossible to meet with what is available at the time of release. The goal is to have teams develop the necessary technologies to meet the challenge.

Currently, the mission boils down to a few key components: competitors must design a vehicle that can autonomously navigate a grid of white lines, with ten objective roomba programmable robots and 4 obstacle roombas. The vehicle must land on each of the objective roombas to depress a button on top of the roomba, changing its direction. By repeatedly changing each of the roombas’ direction, the autonomous air vehicle must direct the roombas across the grid to a thick green line at one end, while steering them away from the thick red line at the other end of the grid. The vehicle must also avoid all the obstacle roombas, as hitting any of them can cause the vehicle to crash, and will disqualify you anyway. Did we mention that the vehicle has to do everything mentioned completely autonomously? That’s the tough part, and is what we’re hoping to solve.

For more information on the competition please visit http://www.aerialroboticscompetition.org/.

This year we are looking forward to a newly designed vehicle, furthering our work with computer vision and localization and increasing the sophistication of our embedded system. We will work hard during the year to accomplish our goals.

Also, please allow us to take a moment to thank all of you for your love and support:

To our friends and family, thank you for your interest in what we do.

To our tremendous sponsors: your funding has allowed us to achieve greatness, and we look forward to maintaining our relationships with you over the coming years.

A final thanks goes to our academic advisors: your insights have proved invaluable.

You all will be hearing from us again soon!