GNSS companies aid drones in upcoming tournament

The Drone Tournament has relaunched following the COVID pandemic, and will take place June 8-10 in Helsinki, Finland.

In the competition, drones will compete to prove precision-control drones over land and sea. GNSS companies Septentrio, Spirent and u-blox will take part.

Sponsored by Ultrahack, the competition seeks to boost use of drone technology, including for 5G networks and satellites. The challenges are especially related to landing and precision flight in demanding and changing environments. Contestant drones will use a wide spectrum of navigation and sensor technology, including GNSS.

U-blox, Spirent and Septentrio are offering their GNSS technology for the participants.

Septentrio and u-blox will provide GNSS services that teams can use to increase performance as they land their drones on a moving boat. To help improve performance, Septentrio and u-blox will provide access to data streams from a base station on the shore and on the boat.

The streams will  provide raw observations in RTCM3 format via NTRIP (which can be used to compute a real-time kinematic, or RTK, position of the drone). The stream from the boat will also provide position, heading and speed of the boat over an IP connection in NMEA or binary format.

Using these streams can help to obtain an RTK solution on the drone or to know the relative position between the drone and the boat.

The winners will receive monetary prizes and the possibility of negotiating commercial agreements for further development of their solutions.

Feature photo: PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images