The Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation brought international attention to the region with the successful launch of their inaugural drone competition which took place on Oct. 8-9.
The event combined military, academic and industry participants competing side by side to establish drone dominance across four different categories: hobbyist, industry, academia and military, before breaking off into teams to compete for ultimate victory.
Day one, after competing amongst their category in first-person view (FPV) races across three different lanes four winners were announced:
On day two, teams came together across sectors for a series of tactical exercises that required collaboration and adaptability. In the end first place went to competitors Jonathan Ficklin, Thomas McGuire, Nick Bogert and Nick Ramsey who were able to claim first prize.
The competition featured a dozen technology vendors and organizations across the country and a number of tech demonstrations across both days from vendors such as Toronto based technology manufacturer and consulting company Quanser Consulting Inc. Vendors were able to showcase their products and position themselves as a potential supplier for military participants.
“We've had some really interesting conversations with a lot of military personnel and some academics so far, and just got a really good opportunity to talk about our technology in more detail,” shared Senior Sales Manager for Quanser Patrick Barnard. “I would say, because we typically sell into academia, we don't have as much military exposure through our sort of day to day activities. So it's been really interesting to chat with that personnel and even learn about some of the challenges that they're trying to face.”
The company was there to showcase their QDrone 2, an autonomous air vehicle tuned to accelerate innovation in multi-agent, swarm, artificial intelligence, machine learning and vision-based applications.
“[It’s] essentially a research computer with props and motors that happens to fly. Our Q drone listing has an embedded NVIDIA GPU and CPU, a full processing unit built in it, with a very varied and comprehensive inertial, visual and odometric sensor suite on it,” shared Quanser Research & Development Manager for Academic Applications Murtaza Bohra. “That includes 360 vision cameras, stereoscopic depth cameras, optical flow, a lot of IMUs, it has a lot of technology on it that makes it essentially an open architecture platform for academics to do research with.”
While vendors were able to showcase their products, academic competitors were able to show off their skills. The DCOMP caught the attention for academics specializing in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) from around the country.
Students from Purdue University’s National Defense Society (NDS) and Drone Club travelled from Indiana in order to participate. According to students, Purdue University is taking a special interest in preparing students to enter the workforce for higher defense technology.
According to Team Lead for the Research and Development for NDS Jake Fidacaro, this type of in-person experience is invaluable for team members.
“Technical projects are a very big thing within Purdue University. It's kind of how you get people to join is through those projects. But that's not just who we are. We really want to focus on the education as well as on professional development,” shared Fidacaro. “We want that brand name of Purdue National Defense Society associated with professional people. They’ll go out there, give their resumes and they'll see that name on there, and they'll know that these people have been educated and have had the opportunity for good training.”
“What we really hope from this competition, is that we can show these companies what we're able to execute when we're given a set of parameters, that we're able and willing to dedicate ourselves and to innovate and ultimately execute what's necessary at a high level,” shared Research & Development Designer and Engineer for NDS, Blake Reynolds.
The NDS members shared that it was a connection through DCOMP sponsor NCInnovation that brought their attention to the contest and that the team was able to buy and build-on to the drones they used to compete. They also shared that the ability to compete was a true team effort between NDS and Drone Club students.
“The Purdue Drone Club has really helped us out a lot with this competition as well. Some of the drones that are being used in the competition are also their own personal drones,” shared NDS Admin Director Jaye Datan. “They're an organization that exists as a kind of social group that loves to fly drones. They have all the experience, and they also have a lot of licensed pilots, which is what we needed for this competition.”
While an official date for another DCOMP has yet to be announced, leadership with the FCEDC shared they do plan to host another event in the future.
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