On July 21, McIntosh’s drone team, made up of commander and senior Arinze Ugbajah, Raaga Sundar, Mark Smith, Tanish Gupta and Landon Aversman, won third place at UAS4STEAM in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The competition is an international competition based on engineering skills.
As commander, Ugbajah oversees multiple tasks.
“I’m in charge of keeping track of everyone’s progress on their developmental tests or improvements on the drone, making sure that since I’m more based on engineering I lead, I kind of help out with the engineering side, making sure that they understand how the drone is working,” Ugajah said.
The typical competition day can be long and complicated. They have different takes they have to do throughout the week.
“The competitions are up in Oshkosh[…] We had to wake up early for the preflight safety briefing, where they tell us, you know, how to stay safe in the air during the competition. Then we go on to do our flights… 20 minutes programming, and then another 30 minutes of flying after that, where we perform that mission we just coded. And then also find targets out on the field, and then go down, log the GPS coordinates, come back, put on our pickup mechanisms and stuff to then go back out again, pick up and drop off items in their designated locations, and then come back to land,” Ugajah said.
As each year goes on the drone team runs into some troubles and needs to diagnose the problems that need to be solved, and the more advanced engineering fixes is also part of Ugbajah’s role.
“Their main goal is just to fix what they what problems that we had last year because we had a bad crash during the flight section. They’re going to go back, see what caused that crash, fix it for the next year, and also make further improvements, since the competition changes almost every year. If there’s new rules or new objectives that we need to do, then they’ll go back through try and engineer their design, engineer new solutions to the problems there, and just hopefully get that AI system working, since we haven’t gotten that fixed,” Ugajah said.
Editor’s note: Ugbajah serves as the Trail staff’s drone footage videographer.
