icarusLabs: An Adventure in Crowdsourcing

Abstract

The objective of the competition was to design and build a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could complete a local surveillance mission. A unique feature of the competition was an experimental crowdsourcing model, in which competing teams were able to provide technical feedback to each other as part of the design process. The icarusLabs team's solution to the challenge combined a tricopter and blended wing body aircraft into a single hybrid airframe. This paper presents the rationale and theory behind the design as well as the lessons learned from the technical and logistical challenges faced. In addition, the authors reflect on the crowdsourcing aspect of the challenge from a competitor's perspective. Overall, incentives for individual teams' success directly conflicted with the essence of crowdsourcing, but the competition was successful at stimulating interest to fill a void in current UAV solutions, bringing together passionate individuals from the global unmanned systems community, and generating a broad range of novel approaches to address the presented challenges.

Design and Implementation of a Thrust-Vectored Unmanned Tail-Sitter with Reconfigurable Wings

“…A hybrid UAV with both cruising flight and VTOL capability will be very useful in such tasks. A few prototypes of hybrid aircrafts fitting these tasks have been designed in the past, such as the tail-sitter airplanes jointly developed by the University of Sydney and the University of Compiegne [2], the hybrid UAV developed by icarusLabs [3] and the tilting-wing quadrotor [4], SUAVI, developed by Hancer and his teammates.…”

Systematic Design and Implementation of a Micro Unmanned Quadrotor System

“…Besides the conventional fixed-wings [14] and rotorcrafts [17,19], many new platforms such as flapping wings and ducted fans aircraft are introduced [2,11,13,18,24,26,31]. Some researchers are also motivated to design unconventional hybrid aircrafts, such as vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fixed-wings UAV to realize navigation in cluttered environments [9,16,23].…”