Armed Autonomous Strike UAV

Teknofest 2022 TÜBİTAK Open-Mission UAV finalist: a hexacopter that runs the entire mission — from takeoff to strike — autonomously. I coded its "brain", the main management unit.

2022 Ana yönetim birimi (otonomi beyni)

Video

Overview

Built for the Teknofest 2022 TÜBİTAK Open-Mission UAV category, this hexacopter performs fully autonomous target detection and strike. I wrote the main management unit — the brain of the UAV — and validated it in simulation.

Autonomy Chain

The management unit ran autonomous takeoff, flight, target detection, lock, strike and landing as a state machine. Based on detections from the AI unit, it commanded the flight controller over MAVLink to complete the detect-track-strike mission unmanned. I tested every scenario in Gazebo / SITL before going to the field.

Outputs & Results

We placed 9th among roughly 50 finalist teams and won a performance award, running the full autonomous takeoff-mission-landing loop on a real field (mission and test flights in the videos).

What I Learned

This is where I learned to manage the gap between simulation and real hardware (latency, sensor noise, safe-abort logic), extending the autonomy architecture I had built for KAPGAN to a more complex mission chain.