{"id":252,"date":"2016-07-12T12:27:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T12:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/?p=252"},"modified":"2016-07-12T14:20:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T14:20:57","slug":"htii-sponsored-homeschoolers-to-compete-for-national-quadcopter-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/2016\/07\/12\/htii-sponsored-homeschoolers-to-compete-for-national-quadcopter-title\/","title":{"rendered":"HTii-sponsored homeschoolers to compete for national quadcopter title"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Enterprise<\/em><\/p>\n

A team of St. Mary\u2019s homeschooled students will vie for a national quadcopter drone title this summer after winning a regional competition last month at Greenwell State Park in Hollywood, Maryland.<\/p>\n

Sponsored by HTii of Lexington Park, the victorious Tradition of Roman Catholic Homeschoolers (TORCH) team will compete in the National Search and Rescue Challenge August 20 at the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) headquarters in Muncie, Indiana.<\/p>\n

Thirteen teams competed in the Greenwell event held April 23-24 in a 200-yard-square airspace over the park. The competition consisted of two flying exercises and a preliminary oral presentation called a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) that tested the teams\u2019 engineering knowledge of their aircraft.<\/p>\n

The eight-man TORCH team totaled 39 out of 64 possible points in the three events for first place. Second place went to the Civil Air Patrol St. Mary\u2019s Composite Squadron with 30.8 points.<\/p>\n

\u201cit was a great opportunity for the kids,\u201d said the TORCH team\u2019s mentor, Andy Pontzer, a flight test engineer at the Webster Field annex of Naval Air Station Patuxent River. \u201cThey learned because they were interested, not because they were forced to. We hope it inspires them to a career in something like computers or aviation.\u201d<\/p>\n

All teams had to fly the same Quadzilla unmanned aerial system (UAS), a four-rotor, video-equipped, radio-controlled drone that can be flown manually or programmed for autonomous, computer-operated flight.<\/p>\n

The project started with a Quadzilla kit that the students had to assemble themselves and learn to operate. Pontzer and the team\u2019s other mentor, retired Marine Corps helicopter test pilot Dan Krall, provided hands-off guidance, but the students did all the work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey learned things like soldering, wiring, planning a mechanical assembly and following instructions,\u201d said Pontzer, who has two sons on the team. \u201cIf they had questions, we helped them find the answers, but we didn\u2019t give them the answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funding to buy kits for St. Mary\u2019s County public high schools came via The Patuxent Partnership, a local non-profit with members from industry, government and academia. The Partnership had collaborated with the county school system and other local organizations to win a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education grant from the Navy\u2019s Office of Naval Research.<\/p>\n

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\"conference\"<\/a>
HTii President Dorothy Hammond times the TORCH team\u2019s FRR presentation on her cell phone as staff members take notes for a post-briefing critique. (Photo Theresa Ford)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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But the TORCH homeschoolers had not been part of the group applying for the grant, \u201cso we went looking for a sponsor,\u201d Pontzer said. \u201cWe sent a letter to the Partnership, they put the word out, and (HTii President) Dorothy Hammond responded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides financial help, HTii worked with the team on the FRR oral presentation. HTii staff members asked questions, took notes as the students talked and gave a detailed critique with suggestions for improvement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe early start we got from HTii was key,\u201d Pontzer said. \u201cWe were off and running in October.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funding for the August trip to the national competition in Indiana shouldn\u2019t be an issue, according to Pontzer. \u201cI figure we\u2019ll road-trip it,\u201d he said. \u201cOne of our parents has an RV, and there\u2019s a campsite in Muncie where we can stay. It shouldn\u2019t be expensive \u2013 just gas and food.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now though, the TORCH team is working with the AMA, which sponsors the events under its UAS4STEM program, to spread the word about building and flying drones. They\u2019ve already demonstrated the technology at the Duke elementary school in Leonardtown at the request of a local AMA representative, Pontzer said. \u201cThe AMA goal is to bring more kids into aeromodeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flying Quadzilla<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the flight competition, the eight-man team was divided into four pairs: two ground crew to conduct preflight checks and change batteries, two safety pilots to fly the drone manually, two video operators to spot objects on the ground and identify them and two computer operators to program the aircraft and enter data.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey switched roles during practice, so they could all learn all parts of the operation,\u201d Pontzer said, \u201cbut not during the competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first airborne event was autonomous flight. Teams had to program their aircraft to take off, fly in sequence to five waypoints designated by latitude, longitude and altitude, hover at each one for five seconds and come to a controlled landing \u2013 all without anyone at the controls.<\/p>\n

Teams were given 30 minutes to complete the autonomous flight exercise, but that included time needed to change the batteries, which only last 10 minutes. They were allowed to take manual control to land and change batteries during the exercise, but the clock kept running.<\/p>\n

The second airborne event was to identify five objects on the ground representing what might be found during a search and rescue mission \u2013 a tent, camping chairs, a bicycle, a mannequin and a model airplane. Teams had to choose a search pattern that was high enough to cover the entire area in the allotted time but low enough to be able to identify the objects.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur kids measured the video camera\u2019s field of view and used that during practice missions to figure out how high they should fly,\u201d said Pontzer. They entered that information and the coordinates of the search box in the flight computer, \u201cand the software built a ladder search pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n

>>Read original article here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Enterprise A team of St. Mary\u2019s homeschooled students will vie for a national quadcopter drone title this summer after winning a regional competition last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,21,9,22,20,23],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uas4stem","tag-competition","tag-regional","tag-stem","tag-suas","tag-torch","tag-uas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amablog.modelaircraft.org\/uas4stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}