The end of MBZIRC 2020

With the end of my contract at LAAS, my experience as a technical leader of the LAAS-team for the robotic challenge MBZIRC2020 is also over.

In this post, we made a short final report of the 6 days of competition in Abu Dhabi. Although our final score does not seem very amazing, our result is still a total win for the team. In less than one year and a half, we managed to design, develop and test a new fully-actuated aerial platform for outdoor experiments. The mechanical design and software framework (including the flight-controller) have been entirely developed from scratch (all our software modules are available in Telekyb). These were very time-consuming operations that permitted us to do only a few outdoor tests before the challenge. In view of this, managing in the last day of competition to have the platform flying over the stack of brick in a completely autonomous mode, was definitely a success. Additionally to the technical results, the team learned a lot of new skills and the event made it even more close-knit.   

Personally, the full project was a unique opportunity for me to grow in terms of managing skills and to explore new scientific challenges related to task/mission planning, multi-robot coordination, and outdoor localization and perception.

Overall, I am very glad to have been part of this project, and I am proud of the work done and commitment showed by every team member.