The ESTACA team won this year’s Dassault UAV Challenge

Dassault UAV Challenge

The 2016-2017 edition of the Dassault UAV Challenge came to a close with the final on April 22 and 23, on the Supelec campus in Gif-Sur-Yvette.

PARIS, 14-Jul-2017 — /EuropaWire/ — The 2016-2017 edition of the Dassault UAV Challenge came to a close with the final on April 22 and 23, on the Supelec campus in Gif-Sur-Yvette.

This challenge offers teams of students in their first and second years of engineering school to assemble a hexacopter drone kit, including various sensors. Their drone must complete a mission in automatic mode, recognizing shapes that mark out trajectories. A new challenge this year requires drones to locate a luminous target on the ground to drop a weight, and then detect a landing point.

There is a general discussion on successful solutions at the end of each edition. The teams are also scored on the quality of their handover report. These two principles help to guarantee the development of the project from year to year.

For Dassault Aviation, investing in this competition meets four objectives:

• to get students working on sensor and systems integration issues in order to conduct complex aeronautical missions like those encountered in industry;
• to help them master project management techniques (planning, task distribution. reports, etc.);
• to make them aware of the importance of teamwork and communication in making their projects a success (progress meetings, inter-team exchanges, debriefs, etc.);
• to get them working on knowledge transfer to the following teams (handover report).

Around forty students participated in the 2016-2017 Challenge, coming from the ESTACA, Supelec, ENSAM ParisTech, ENSMA, ENSTA, ESTIA and ENAC engineering schools. The ESTACA team won this latest competition, followed by ENSTA and ENSMA.

SOURCE: Dassault Aviation