Nicholas Hoang had the opportunity to take the wheel designing vehicles that could operate without one.
“It was a really cool learning experience from start to finish because we were given so much freedom in how we wanted to design our vehicles,” said Hoang, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in May. “Because we had that freedom, we got to think about different types of materials to use and different ways to configure our vehicles that we wouldn’t usually get to experiment with.”
Hoang was one of about 50 students from five universities to compete in the first East Coast RTX Autonomous Vehicles Competition hosted at the Virginia Tech Drone Park.
“We started this competition about four years ago in other areas of the country, like the Texas region,” said Leonard Chen, Raytheon director for technology development. “But this is the first time the schools represented today have been able to compete.”
Chen and a team of Raytheon engineers traveled to Virginia Tech to judge the competition.
The event was hosted by the Virginia Tech Hume Center for National Security and Technology, which is housed under the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. It was held at the Virginia Tech Drone Park, part of the Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, which allows the vehicles to be in an environment that is fully enclosed – and able to operate free of certificate – but still open to the elements.
“It’s a very safe flight environment,” said Sarah Rhodes, Virginia Tech Drone Park operations and training manager. “We’re completely separated from the national airspace, so we don’t actually have to require special certifications like you would if you were conducting this competition anywhere else.”
The members of Virginia Tech’s autonomous vehicles team are part of a RTX Fellowship Program through the Hume Center, which serves as the hub for national security-focused experiential student learning and workforce development at the university. Students can learn more about ways to get involved at the Hume Center through internships, workforce development programs, and research opportunities at the upcoming Hume Center Undergraduate Research Open House on Aug. 28.
In addition to the Virginia Tech team, which was awarded second place, universities represented at the competition include George Mason University, which was awarded first place, and the University of South Florida, which was awarded third place, as well as George Washington University and Howard University.
In the months leading up to the competition, student teams built one fully autonomous air vehicle and one fully autonomous ground vehicle, both of which had to participate in a series of qualifying challenges.
At the competition, students were tasked with programming their autonomous air vehicles to recognize the ground vehicles of other teams when flying overhead, triggering water to shoot from their air vehicle and hit other teams ground vehicles while also avoiding hitting their own.
The competition introduced students to challenges they may face in the workforce, which highlighted the importance of an interdisciplinary approach.
“What really made this possible for us is having people with different areas of expertise on our team,” said Ella Rasmussen, a Virginia Tech rising senior in computer science and secure computing. “We have members of our team in all different majors and people who prefer coding versus working on the physical vehicle and vice versa. We wouldn’t have been able to bring it all together if everyone on our team had the same major and experience and thought about problems the same way.”
Lindsey Haugh for Virginia Tech
