Australia announces new UAV competition
Queensland contest open to high school and university students; A$60,000 prize intended to raise awareness of this major local industry; “Smart State” is home to 30 percent of the country’s UAV production
Put another UAV on the barbie. Premier Peter Beattie of Queensland, Australia has announced a new contest to encourage the development of unmanned drones. Unlike similar competitions, however, this one is limited to high school and university students, and the prize is only A$60,000. “The competition aims to raise awareness about the underlying technology, stimulate interest in studying it, and getting more people thinking about how it can be used,” said Beattie. Under the terms of the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Challenge competitors will test their entries against a hypothetical course “that will involve dropping off emergency medical supplies to people lost in the bush.”
Readers may wonder why Queensland is so interested in UAVs, such technology typically being of main interest to national governments. As it turns out, the region — which now markets itself as “The Smart State” — is already the home to 30 percent of Australia’s UAV industry. The group mentioned above, the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation, is itself a collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and has received A$3.5 million in state funding to get it off the ground. All of this is done in the expectation that the UAV industry could pay large dividends in the future. The center has projected its UAV research could be worth A$543 million to the Queensland economy in the next ten years.
-read more in this news release; for competition details, see this Web site
