KUAM 2022 runners-up
Famously known as Korea’s most prestigious UAV contest, the ’20th Korea Robot Aircraft Contest KUAM 2022 was held on the 20th of September. As a part of the ARRF (Aerial Robotics Research Facility) team from Kyungpook National University, I took part in the finals of class 1 of the contest. We won 2nd place in our first entry to the contest.
The task was a last-mile-delivery mission to deliver an object to an apartment verandah in an urban environment and return back safely. The UAV is required to have the following capabilities,
- Fully autonomous Navigation
- Obstacle avoidance
- Reach the GPS pin of the drop-off location
- Find the precise drop-off location by using the visual clue
- Autonomously deliver the object (A Pizza box)
- Precision landing
I was in charge of the overall design of the drone platform and the delivery mechanism. I designed and developed a novel lightweight rotary locking mechanism that is actuated by lightweight servos. For further details please refer to the dedicated post on the design of this mechanism.
I was also in charge of the detection of the drop-off point. According to the competition rules we had to detect a cross-like visual clue and enter the apartment verandah in order to deliver the object. I devised a method to find this marker’s location and orientation in relation to the drone using the input of a depth camera and a lightweight neural network ‘Movilenet SSD V2’. Details of this are already published in KSAS 2022 conference.
Sasanka Kuruppuarachchi 