The Raytheon Autonomous Vehicle Competition
The Raytheon Autonomous Vehicle Competition is a competition between universities sponsored by Raytheon. The premise of the competition is for each team to build both an unmanned aerial vehicle and an unmanned ground vehicle that can complete certain tasks through multiple trials. In all the trials, each university’s UAV goes one at a time to find the other competitors’ UGVs placed randomly on a field and deliver a water payload. The UGV must detect and give both a visual, and audio indication of the water payload if hit. Subsequent trials have the UGV moving in increasingly complicated patterns, such as a straight line, zigzag, and crossing paths with other UGVs. All of this must be done autonomously with no human input other than starting the vehicles.
This project was LaiLa’s Senior Capstone Project and spanned the three quarters of senior year. It was worked on by a 10-person multidisciplinary team of 5 mechanical engineering majors and 5 electrical engineering majors. As one of the mechanical engineering majors, LaiLa worked on the hardware for both the UAV and the UGV. For the UGV, she specifically designed and fabricated the ArUco marker mount that went on top of the UGV. ArUco markers were what the UAV used to detect and determine whether a UGV was a team’s own UGV or another team’s. For the UAV, LaiLa mostly worked on assembling the purchased drone kit and doing repairs.
The competition had four divisions in its most recent run: East, West, South, and Puerto Rico. UC Santa Barbara was in the West division, competing against CSU Long Beach and CalPoly San Luis Obispo. UCSB won first place! This was mostly by default since UCSB’s UAV was the only UAV that could successfully fly.
See more here: UCSB Capstone Projects