PALAPA-707

PALAPA-707 is the name of Universitas Indonesia team on Indonesia Flying Robot Contest 2018 that competed on Vertical Take-Off and Landing Category. The missions were to autonomously (1) drop a pre-loaded payloads on a designated location, (2) pick additional payloads, and finally (3) drop the picked payload on another location. The last two missions have the largest points since the first mission is relatively easy. As a side note, the competition has a limit on the drone dimension, weight, as well as battery capacity.

Our algorithm is quite simple. We simply employ PID controller for the control and color + shape detection from camera to get the target. The hardest part is mostly due to sensor issue: unreliable barometer and GPS (probably due to cheap hardware 😅). We were only a group of undergraduate students which had no experience in hardware and mostly hack our way through. Thus, to resolve the issue, we mostly experimented with different actuation mechanism (from a simple magnet, electro magnet, "handclaw" mechanism, etc). We finally settle on "flap" which is shown on the video below (this was our first successful attempt!)

We lost track of the records where we crashed our drone before settling on the "flap" mechanism. The "flap" mechanism of course is still faulty. However, it is the best mechanism that we could come up with. Here is one of the many videos of such failure cases (very dangerous 🥲).

Lastly, this is the trial video on the place of competition (Kota Baru, Lampung Province). We were given two attempts. There are things that we didn't anticipate during the competition. First, the field was not flat as promised, thus it messed up our shape detection system to detect the target. You can see in the video below that our drone failed to detect the second payload 🥲🥲🥲

As you might have wondered, our "flap" mechanism makes the overall drone is a bit unstable. One fatal thing that we never had trial on is different wind condition since we only did trial on our campus. This is the video where we were one of the unlucky teams that had to perform the mission on the HARSH WIND CONDITION 😭😭😭

We just went rock-and-roll with it and banged up our drone quite bad 🤘😭🤘 This was in fact our first trial. The second trial is the video before the last one. So we got a lot of work to do after the first trial. Note that there were only two teams who were successfully perform the last two missions and we were one of them (the other one ended up on the first place). Overall, despite only winning Honorable Mention, we were (and are) quite proud of our achievement.