Heartfelt congratulations to Alex Chin and Zhiwei Lee, our final year students, with their supervisor, Dr. Ho Hann Woei, for winning 2nd place in the AIoT, FPGA & Embedded Systems Track in Innovate Malaysia Design Competition 2022 from the School of Aerospace Engineering!

According to the organizer, they received 222 team applications this year from 30 universities nationwide signing up for this competition, but only 25 teams were shortlisted as the finalist teams. It was indeed very competitive, and the team was up for a very challenging task this year.

The objective of the DIY drone is to catch a small, portable drone (intruder) with,
1) Inverted motors on tilted arms,
2) real-time machine learning detector running onboard and,
3) automatic flight performed with control strategies.

Putting innovative ideas into practice is never easy, especially when there are multiple external factors that could happen in real-world environments.

“Our drone managed to detect, track (align the heading), and approach the intruder in almost all the flight tests, without relying on human pilot control or any external system. Unfortunately, there is still room for improvement for the final catching phase,” said Dr. Ho.

Yet, Dr. Ho is optimistic about the current design shortcoming and thinks this could be the next problem statement for his research.
Once again, kudos and well done to Alex and Zhi Wei for trying their very best and able to attain this achievement for themselves and the school as well!


Original text by Dr. Ho Hann Woei, adapted by Dr. Chang Wei Shyang