IMAV 2014 was a great experience for the 1 Bit Squared team. If you don't know what it is, its a micro air vehicle competition and conference that was held in Delft, Netherlands this year.

 

During the three days of the conference, there were many very interesting talks and presentations as well as an incredible showcase of research talent during the competition. We made a selection of some of our favorite presentations that we wanted to highlight here on the blog.

 

The Keynote speech at IMAV 2014 was a presentation by Dr. Sawyer B. Fuller - 'Fabrication, sensing, and feedback control of a fly-sized aerial robot'. Besides being an incredible feat in manufacturing, the micro robotics laboratory group is showing an unprecedented miniaturization of synthetic ornithopter. We couldn't believe how small their fly-sized robots are, until we compared our smallest autopilot the Lisa/S to their vehicle. Just to note the scale, the Lisa/S is the size of a postage stamp and fits on the tip of your finger. We realize that the field of micro electronics technology has to advance a little bit before we can scale down our hardware enough to mount on this thing.

 

 

The second talk we wanted to highlight was presented by Gautier Hattenberger. A very good friend of ours from ENAC who is also one of the core developers of Paparazzi UAV. He gave a very interesting talk highlighting the use of the Paparazzi UAV framework in autonomous aerial robot research.

Bart Remes gave a presentation on our collaboration with them regarding the Lisa/S and nano Quadcopters. If you are interested in the technical side of the hardware we develop here at 1 Bit Squared you will definitely enjoy his talk.

 There were many more talks well worth watching that were presented at IMAV 2014 but too many to mention here. So we have included a playlist of all the presentations.

Last but not least we definitely have to highlight the UAV competition itself. You would have to be there with us to see the huge amount of talent and ingenuity at work at the Universities and research programs working on creating usable and reliable systems with real world applications. Here is a small sampling of the event this year, IMAV 2014 compilation video.

 

If you were curious about the results of the competition, the first place was taken by a Singapore team with a great fleet of high tech quadcopters. The second place went to a German team led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus-Peter Neitzke that flew completely FPV and the third place went to our friends at ENAC flying Paparazzi powered quadcopters and airplanes. They also created the most usable and complete aerial maps of the village.

And finally I have to thank Bart Remes and the TU-Delft MavLab team that made the whole event possible. It was a pleasure to be there and help sponsor the event.