Space Hackathon: ARLISS Challenge

"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."

― Stephen Hawking

Preface

Space was the theme of the Intel Space Hackathon hosted by Magnitude.io. The hackathon spanned over two days, with three different challenges. In a team of five, my friends and I registered for the ARLISS Challenge.

Mission Statement

"Build a robot and fly it in a rocket! Deployed from a rocket in the Black Rock Desert at an altitude of more than 2 miles, your robot must find its way to a designated marker on the desert floor. Design a fixed wing, quad drone, rover or some other unique design with the mass and volume specifications. ARLISS (A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites) is an international competition that began in 1999. Learn more about it here."

Conceptualizing the Aircraft

Before creating the actual robot, we had to design it first. Two members in our group, from Cal's Design, Build, Fly Club, proposed that we create an aircraft that relies on vector thrust. From there, we designed the aircraft similar to the US Military Switchblade Drone, such that its wings would "switch out" like a jack knife. Thus our team name was "Jack Knife". We also felt that vectored thrust was the best method for altitude control.

How I Contributed

For the competition, we had to use the Intel Edison micro-controller for our robot. As the head of software, I was in charge of implementing the sensors (GPS, Barometer and Magnetometer) as well as the servos the aircraft would use in C++. Our final submission to the competition can be found here. These two days were exhausting, as I pulled two all nighters, but well worth it in terms of robotics design and experience.

What I Learned

Open source is the new black.

There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. I found many of the baseline software modules we implemented in our aircraft through open source websites like GitHub. From there, we could augment the code to fit our robot's specifications and purpose. Without open source, this project would've been extremely hard to complete in two days.

Don't be afraid to ask for help.

Throughout this project, we would face towering roadblocks that were out of our scope of expertise. For one, it took us the longest time to familiarize ourselves with the Intel Edison micro-controller, as it had little to no documentation and was not been released to the public at the time. Luckily for us, many Intel engineers attended the event and helped us debug our robot.

Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

Before this event, if I were to ask myself if I could create an autonomous aircraft in two days, I would've called myself "overly optimistic" and "extremely foolish". But this event taught me that the most important aspect of engineering is imagination and motivation. What keeps me working that extra hour on my projects is my genuine interest in the subject and my perseverance to see my dreams turn into reality. With the right ideas, mental drive, and access to resources, anything is possible.