Baris told us some of his memories from competiing, what he gained from developing a team and some top tips for teams to consider as they start another year of the UAS Challenge.
Q: Please tell us a bit more about yourself and your background
Baris Ondes (BO): I am E. Baris Ondes and I graduated from Istanbul Technical University, BSc. in Aeronautical Engineering, in Control and Automation Engineering, and also MSc. in Aerospace Engineering. My academic supervisor was Dr. Ismail Bayezit, who was also involved in the UAS challenge as Team Hedef’s supervisor.
I preferred academy over industry after graduation and I worked as teaching & research assistant in the Aeronautical Engineering Department at Istanbul Tech.
In August 2019 I joined Virginia Tech as a Ph.D. researcher in Aerospace Engineering, and I now study for my Ph.D. degree and work as a graduate assistant under the supervision of Dr. Cornel Sultan.
Q: Tell us about your involvement in the UAS Challenge
BO: I was the leader of Team Hedef during my studies at Istanbul Technical University and we discovered the UAS Challenge in the Autumn of 2016. We were looking for a UAS competition that involves autonomous flight with challenging missions and IMechE’s Challenge seemed like a great option after reading the rules.
We built a fixed-wing aircraft with an inverted V-tail named Tulpar, which is the winged horse in Turkic Mythology. Paul Jacques, the Flight Safety Officer at the time, complemented our work saying that Tulpar had the best structural integrity, and he would choose it amongst all if he had to make a choice. I guess we proved him right in 2018 while flying without issues under extreme weather conditions.
We participated in two years in a row; in the first outing in 2017 we won the Manufacturing Award and placed fifth overall. We followed this in 2018, where we secured Grand Champion title and we won the Safety & Airworthiness Award, due to our flight capability. In both years, our Flight Readiness Review was awarded the best submission.
What are the top three things that you learned during the UAS Challenge?
BO: I would list soft skills, safety habits, and practical project experience.
During university studies, we do not have a chance to participate in a real-world engineering project to practice and improve our soft skills. Soft skills are always emphasized during the seminars, but as an engineer I believe the best way to learn a skill is to practice. The UAS Challenge helped us to improve our teamwork, communication, taking responsibility and many other skills.
Safety is extremely important in aviation and having an unmanned system does not make the rules any less strict; the judges and other officials made this very clear in every part of the competition. We also learned this habit during the design process to cover all the risks, in workshops during manufacturing and in the field to follow the checklist in detail every time.
Preparing such a project in less than a year makes it impossible to handle everything perfectly. Besides the limited time, also the resources are very limited too. Therefore, you always have to consider the constraints and be ready for the issues by having back-up scenarios or quick solutions. On top of all these, organizing a trip for the team from overseas without missing anything improved my organization skills excessively.
I think that before graduating an engineering student needs to feel that excitement/proud of seeing their own designed, own manufactured, own programmed aircraft in the sky flying confidently. Even after conducting successful flights for more than forty times, I have always been very excited at each take-off and felt the stress in all my nerves before each the landing, because I was a part of this product.
How did UAS Challenge help in securing your first postgraduate position?
BO: During the applications, besides having a strong academic background, extra-curricular activities matter a lot to show that you offer more than just your high graded transcripts. The achievements in the UAS Challenge and my role in the team supported my interpersonal skills and I think they strengthened my profile significantly.
Even though I haven’t chosen to work industry after graduating, I went to several interviews with defense companies in Turkey and the managers were fascinated to hear about our achievements in the UAS Challenge.
I also contacted the professors before applying for a PhD. in their department and I needed to keep the first email short and effective, so I referred to the Grand Champion Title that we achieved in the email to highlight my capabilities in Unmanned Systems.
What’s your favorite memory from being involved in the challenge?
In 2017 during the showcase flight we forgot to attach our GPS Module on the hatch, so it was freely moving inside the fuselage. After the manual flight demonstration, we turned the autonomous mode on and the UAS did not follow the waypoints but started to fly in a very strange manner because it was not able to identify its direction via the compass, which was inside the non-fixed GPS module. It would crashed unless Yusuf Demiroglu, our highly skilled safety pilot, hadn't regained control in manual mode and saved it at less than two-meters of altitude, which is a very low altitude for an aircraft flying around 20 m/s. Then we realized our mistake and fixed it before conducting the mission flight successfully.
Of course, hearing the announcement of the Grand Champion in 2018 was a hugely proud moment; one of my favorite moments in my life.
What advice would you give to teams competing this year?
BO: The committee considers safety at the extreme level and that was one of my favorite things about the UAS Challenge. They must develop a strict air safety culture and keep the design efficient but also simple to repair or change parts during the failures. We had two airframes ready to fly in the competition and we were able to take them from Turkey to the UK in an acceptably-sized cargo box.
Test flights are crucial to experience what could go wrong during in-flight operations and to validate the UAS. Therefore, we always tried to finalize our aircraft design as early as possible and the photo below was taken on 10 February, 2017, our first flight on a freezing winter day.
Finally, what would you say to students who are thinking about getting involved?
BO: First of all, they must be ready for extreme weather conditions, as the UK weather is highly uncertain (probably most of the readers will know this better than me!) We had flown our UAS in the limits defined in the rules without any issue, therefore after finalizing your design do not seek a sunny, calm day without any strong winds and gusts, but test your UAS in severe weather conditions.
My second piece of advice would be keeping things simple and reliable. The low-cost products used in a UAS do not have military-grade certification and might fail anytime. Besides, the project time is very limited to consider every design/manufacturing issue, so I suggest them to have a modular design where most of the part changes are very easy.
We connected with a lot of valuable people both during the event and after the challenge from future participants and I still keep in contact with them. I suggest that future participants to get to know as many as people they can during the challenge and enjoy the diverse cultural backgrounds. Also, camping with other universities would be much more fun than staying at a hotel.
I am sure they will love this experience regardless of their awards, and I am looking forward to seeing new designs with new rules and restrictions!
Thanks to Baris for sharing his wonderful memories and experiences of the competition. Registration for the UAS Challenge 2021 is open until 15 November 2020; visit the UAS Challenge website for the rules and how you and your team can get involved!