International Aerial Robotics Competition
[1] The term “aerial robotics” was coined by competition creator Robert Michelson in 1990 to describe a new class of small highly intelligent flying machines.
[2][3] Successive years of competition saw these aerial robots grow from vehicles that could barely maintain themselves in the air, to automatons which are self-stable, self-navigating, and able to interact with their environment.
[11] In 1996, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, with backing from Draper Labs, created a small fully autonomous flying robot that repeatedly and correctly mapped the location of all five of the toxic waste drums, and correctly identified the contents of two from the air,[12] completing approximately seventy five percent of the mission.
[18] It was conducted at the U.S. Army's Fort Benning Soldier Battle Lab using the McKenna MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) site.
The fifth mission required a fully autonomous aerial vehicle to penetrate the structure and negotiate the more complex interior space containing hallways, small rooms, obstacles, and dead ends in order to search for a designated target without the aid of global-positioning navigational aids, and relay pictures back to a monitoring station some distance from the structure.
Mission 8 focused on non-electronic human-machine interaction for the first time, with four aerial robots assisting humans to complete tasks that one person could not independently accomplish.
The following year, Mission 8 was successfully completed in Kunming China at the Yunnan Innovation Institute of Beihang University in under 8 minutes by three teams.
[29] Mission 9 focused on fully autonomous flight using only onboard computing while avoiding obstacles and other aerial robots over a 3 km route, to replace a 2 kg (4.4 pound), approximately 1m (39 inch) long communications module on the mast of a moving platform (a boat in Sea State 3) and return home in under 9 minutes.
[30] Twelve registered teams from four different nations attempted to conduct the mission at their home universities, necessitated by COVID travel restrictions.
[31][32] Collegiate teams participating in the IARC have come primarily from the United States and the People's Republic of China, but also from Germany, England, Switzerland, Norway, Spain, Canada, Chile, Qatar, Iran, and India.
[33][34] The aerial robots vary in design from fixed wing airplanes, to conventional helicopters,[35] to ducted fans, to airships,[36] and beyond to bizarre hybrid creations.
Size or weight constraints are normally placed on the aerial robots, which must be equipped with a method of manually activated remote override of the primary propulsion system.
[38] Mission 8 was an exception in that it allowed a human operator to control four autonomous aerial vehicles by means of hand gestures or spoken commands.
Therefore, an incremental "growing prize pot" was established, to which the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Foundation added another US$10,000 each year.
[45] Mission 9 was completed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and was awarded $10,000 in 2023 for the best performance against a field of twelve international teams coming from the United States, China, and India.
[47] After the initial success and tremendous media attention garnered by the IARC, the AUVSI launched the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition [48] a few years later in Detroit, MI.
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Foundation (rebranded in 2009 as “RoboNation”) continues to support these competitions with logistics and prize money although there are numerous industry co-sponsors as well.
