DNA+ 2022 Competition – Grand Prize Winner

This competition is conducted by the Korean water resources agency (K-Water) and the ETRI research institute. The event consisted of 3 main events; a Business event, a river, and an inland mission. The last two events were conducted on the 27th of October 2022 where we were required to complete two long-range autonomous searches and identification of survivors missions.

I participated in the competition as a part of the ARRF (Aerial Robotics Research Facility) team from Kyungpook National University. The drone is required to,

Cover the designated area within 10 minutes
Identify people in water and people in land separately
Identify people standing in the woods
Generate GPS locations on detected targets

We chose to navigate the search area manually via LTE as it allows us greater flexibility and to make use of the limited time allowed. The search area was over 2 KMs away so it was required to fly out of the line of sight. I was the designated pilot and I flew the drone using the FPV feed and telemetry.

The detection part of the mission was also challenging as there was almost no public dataset available that we could use to train a neural network to detect people on the water. We collected numerous drone shots in multiple river locations around the Daegu area and synthesized the images by adding human figures digitally to create a dataset. I trained Yolo v5 and implemented it into the drone.