Laptops battled empty energy drink and soft drink cans for table-top supremacy under the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering’s Hoosier High Flyers team tent. A discarded blanket draped over a chair reflected all-nighter dedication. Off to one side, red blimps (officially known as lighter-than-air vehicles) of various sizes and purposes, designed for human and autonomous control, hovered for deployment with whirring-motor insistency.
High above at Multidisciplinary Engineering Sciences Hall’s windowless High Bay, green, purple, red and blue balloons were stuck in ceiling beams, casualties of earlier competitions likely to remain trapped until their helium is exhausted weeks or perhaps months in the future.
All were artifacts of a Luddy School Defend the Republic Drone Competition job well done -- the Hoosier High Flyers earned first- and second-place finishes against six other college teams
The High Flyers’ strong performance had the 21 team members buzzing even as Or Dantsker, assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, stayed in constant motion in his capacity as competition director.
“Defend the Republic is a great event for students to apply concepts they’ve learned in the Intelligent Systems Engineering program,” Dantsker said. “It also provides fantastic opportunities for the students to work in teams to come up with innovative engineering solutions to practical challenges, further enhancing their abilities to tackle real-world problems. I have been very impressed by our students’ drive and talent throughout the multi-month preparation leading up to the competition.”
The Hoosier High Flyers finished second to the Lehigh University Swarms in a tightly contested 1 vs. 1 Individual Final, then joined with the University of Michigan’s WolvAir to win the 2 vs. 2 Championship Match over Lehigh University and Baylor University. That success reflected long days and nights of dedicated mental and physical effort, fueled in part by energy drinks.
“They all have been doing all-nighters,” said Jonathan Ponniah, Intelligent Systems Engineering visiting faculty. “Last minute fine tuning is really taxing.”
Who needs sleep when there’s work to do and a competition to win, when there’s a chance to test your intellectual and physical skills in ways that might once day lead to career success and future innovations?
“It’s been a blast,” said Intelligent Systems Engineering senior Jackson Ermi, a team pilot who invested two semesters on the project. “It gives us an intellectually challenging opportunity to apply some of the skills we’ve learned in school. It does it in a medium that is engaging and fun. It gives you a competitive environment to apply the things you’ve been learning. It’s a great way for people who are competitively inclined to be engaged.”
The competition, involving more than 50 cutting-edge aerial vehicles from IU, the University of Michigan, Lehigh University, Georgia Institute of Technology, George Mason University, Baylor University and Arizona State University, was designed to push the boundaries of autonomous mobile vehicles, in this case lighter-than-air vehicles. Students developed innovative solutions to complex, real-world problems by focusing on vehicle design, communication and edge computation.
Teams designed and built scoring and defending/interference vehicles, some of which reached speeds up to 15 mph. The goal was to push balloons through yellow and orange aerial goals high above the High Bay’s concrete floor while preventing other teams from scoring. Teams got one point for manually scoring through radio control, three points by scoring autonomously with human assistance and 10 points if scoring totally autonomously.
This required problem solving of the highest order. IU students used hardware and software to design lightweight vehicles made of carbon fiber, Kevlar threads, balsa wood and more.
“They have to do problem solving in ways they haven’t been trained in school,” Ponniah said. “They have to anticipate what is going on in this complicated system and do a process of elimination to hone in on the issue.”
Added Dantsker: “The DTR competition closely mirrors the challenges students will face in their professional engineering careers after graduating from Luddy. The skills and experiences they gain through this rigorous event not only give them a competitive edge over their peers, but also lay a strong foundation for future career success.”
Team members were from Dantsker’s ENGR399/599 Autonomous Sports class and from IU’s Aerospace Systems Lab, which Dantsker directs. They were:
Class: Mohammed Alnuaimi, ISE senior; Andrew Borgsdorf, ISE junior; Julian Camacho, ISE senior (4+1); Eissa Colbert, ISE senior; Dominik Emmert, ISE junior; James Hixon II, ISE senior; Kendal Merry, ISE senior (4+1); Joshua Pikner, ISE freshman; Brage Qviller, ISE junior; Logan Riddle, ISE senior; and Joseph Thompson, ISE senior (4+1).
Lab and Class: Brendan Cox, ISE senior; Jackson Ermi, ISE senior; Jace Lemp, ISE senior; and Andrew Meighan, ISE PhD student.
Lab: Paul Coen, Computer Science PhD student; Matthew Dempsey, ISE freshman; Sehoon Park, ISE junior; Caeden Taylor, ISE senior (4+1), Department of Defense Smart Scholar; Matthew Widjaja, ISE sophomore; and Samantha Woodward, ISE senior (4+1).
The Hoosier High Flyers named their nine vehicles Maverick (four of them), Iceman (one), Fatman (one), Witch (two) and Zombie (one). Depending on their function, they were outfitted with nets, hooks and spears. Two were used for scoring, the others for defending/interference.
One red Luddy balloon had white hooks hanging from it designed to damage, but not puncture, competitor blimps.
“We want to create havoc,” Ermi said with a smile.
For Intelligent Systems Engineering senior Samantha Woodward, it was another exciting Luddy School opportunity that had previously included last spring’s Code19 Racing’s Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League.
“What is cool about this is that the blimps are somewhat simple, so you can get your hands on every part of it,” she said. “I’ve done soldering of all the hardware, plus the wiring of it all as well as the coding of it so it can do object detection. It is cool can get your hands on every part of a smart system.”
The competition didn’t end the work. Woodward said she is working on her own blimp, called the Zombie.
“It’s not fully done,” she said with a smile. “We’ll see how many all- nighters it takes to finish that.”
Joanna Millunchick, Luddy School dean, attended the event and emphasized the school’s uniqueness in taking engineering from a “very data forward perspective.”
“What you see here is a culmination of engineering prowess in building lighter-than-air vehicles while also coding these vehicles to do exciting things. Who knows where this technology will appear? These are the students who are doing it.”
Paul Macklin, associate professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering and associate dean for Undergraduate Education, said the competition was an “important and fantastic opportunity for students to practice combining their skills at creating hardware, in this case robotics, and programming them with software and artificial intelligence.”
“It’s finding ways to combine them to solve real problems in challenging environments and real-world conditions,” he said. “One cool thing is you have a plan, and then you have to adapt. It’s neat to see these students adapt on the fly and build upon the skills they’ve learned to solve these problems while working together with resource constraints.”
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The event also included a high school drone competition that featured 27 students from Bloomington High School North, Bloomington High School South, Loogootee High School and Washington Catholic High School.
Mary Loveless, director of Undergraduate Studies for Intelligent Systems Engineering, credited funding from IU Center for Reliable and Trusted Electronics and support from the Aerospace Systems Lab for the high school competition opportunity.
“We wanted the students to experience engineering for challenging constraints that this type of competition offered,” Loveless said. “We are incredibly proud of these teams for how they showed determination and problem-solving to build, pilot, and compete with their teams' drone. These are the type of challenging conditions that engineers from ISE could face. We're happy to see the next generation rising to opportunity.”
Luddy’s Intelligent Systems Engineering Department provides many exciting opportunities, said Beth Plale, Intelligent Systems Engineering chair and Michael A and Laurie Burns McRobbie Bicentennial professor.
“Coupling the high-school program with the collegiate program embodies what we try to do in the department, which is to give people hands-on experience where they can apply the foundational skills they learn in the classroom in practical application,” Plale said.
“Having high school students do something similar to what the college students did, but on a simpler scale, provided a fantastic transitionary experience for them.
“We saw this as a perfect opportunity to give our Indiana high school students a hands-on experience with the kinds of exciting challenges that a degree in engineering can offer.”