2020 UAS Challenge in review

The UAS Challenge's Chief Judge, Lambert Dopping-Hepenstahl, gives his thoughts on the 2020 competition.

Each year the IMechE UAS Challenge has grown in size with increasing numbers of entrants from outside the UK. 2020 saw entries from 36 teams from 10 countries including 10 universities new to the competition.

The judging team of very experienced aerospace engineers have had quite a challenge themselves going through all the teams’ Design Review documents, providing each with a score and some critical advice. Under normal circumstances this paperwork exercise would just be part of the process to find the winners of the 13 awards handed out after the Demonstration Event in June. However, with the restrictions imposed by the global pandemic, we have had to select winners for awards that can still be judged on the basis of the submitted documents and any Dragon’s Den videos.

It is a great pity that we have not been able to see all the teams’ hard work reach the flying stage as we have seen some very promising and diverse designs. It must have been a major frustration to the team members also but we hope that they will have gained some valuable experience in reaching as far as the Critical Design Review, the point when the design is locked down for manufacture. We have been impressed this year with the overall standard of the Design Review documents, which are a great introduction to the students of the processes used by the aerospace industry to ensure the safety and airworthiness of its products. It was also good to see that many teams were undertaking sub-system testing early and leaving more time for full system testing to improve their chance of success at the Demonstration Event.

Each year the rules for the competition are updated with the benefit of experience and to give new challenges. 2020 saw increased emphasis on the energy efficiency of the design. This has resulted in more teams going for fixed wing and hybrid designs and with some doing excellent trade-off calculations between airframe, propulsion and payload to score maximum points in the core and optional missions. We were pleased to see some interesting innovations in design and manufacturing and the approaches teams were taking with their transport boxes. We are pretty confident that all of the teams would have had a good shot at the missions and provided some very entertaining flying. From past experience we would be a lot less confident at being able to predict who would have come out on top as despite good theory, testing, preparation and teamwork are not easy to judge on paper!