The IARC Mission 9 involved having an aerial vehicle travel 3 km into the ocean to replace a magnetically attached communications module on a randomly swaying ship mast. Then the vehicle has to return to the start location - all within 9 minutes.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the competition switched to a simulation challenge.

Being part of the Mechatronics subdivision of Team Aerove at UMIC, the major challenges I handled were designing and optimizing the drone frames and replacement mechanism for the module along with power calculations and electronic selection.

We were declared the WORLD CHAMPIONS for the Mission 9 2020 Simulation Challenge amongst 20 international teams from 5 continents.

IARC switched back to hardware mode finally in 2021, and Team Aerove started preparing to implement everything we did in simulation in the real world. I was part of the Controls subdivision for the team this time. As the mission involved high-speed laps and in-flight aerial manipulation, I researched into various non-linear controllers and implemented a high-level controller for disturbance rejection along with generating an optimal trajectory which requires minimum control effort.