An update

Ascend
Oct 26, 2015
2 min read

Since we first published this web site, a lot of stuff has happened. This post tries to cover the gap from our first post in July up until now.

New members

We've increased in size - from 11 to 14 members. Alexander joined this summer. Nils and Alexander now work together on the AI-problem, writing a thesis for Keith Downing. In September we did a public recruitment round, where we got many very good applicants. The result: Brage joined Control and Thomas joined Perception. We are very glad to have them all on board.

New sponsors

We are dependent on sponsors to complete this project. We have been very fortunate to be sponsored by:

Elefun: Elefun is a Norwegian web shop selling drones and drone hardware. They have been king in helping us out with some of the hardware for our drone.
Fiken: Fiken is a great accounting web app, letting us spend more time on drones and less time on accounting.
3DR: 3D Robotics has many great products. Both complete drones and equipment for drones. Their great Pixhawk PX4 autopilot is now a part of our stack.
Løten RC-shop: Løten RC shop sells great RC-gear. Some of their gear now powers our drone.

We are very grateful for the support.

Later this week, we will also announce our team's main sponsor.

Atlassian community license

Atlassian, known for solutions such as Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence, have granted us a community license for their products. We now use their software actively when working with Ascend.

Jira: We use Jira as our project management tool. This makes it much easier for us to keep track of tasks and their status. In addition we use Jira Portfolio for planning.
Confluence: Confluence is Atlassian's wiki solution. We use this a lot to share and store knowledge. Confluence is very important for the our long term strategy of making the team smarter. Even though the team will change quite substantially from year to year, the team becomes smarter as knowledge is retained in our wiki.

A big thanks to Atlassian for letting us use their great software for free!

The lab has been refurbished

The Institute of Engineering Cybernetics has helped us out A LOT with the lab. We have painted it white, the floor has been changed, we have gotten a lot of office equipment and more. During this process, the lab has been un-operational in periods. Now it is ready for continuous use. The lab has a very interesting history, as the founder of the Institute of Engineering Cybernetics once used the lab for some of his experiments. History and pictures will follow in another post. Stay tuned.

Our first drone is flying

We have built our first drone - and it flies! While we expect that we will need some iterations before deciding on which platform to use in the competition, we now have a very good starting point.

Getting social

Currently the activity is low, but the ambitions are high. We will soon start using Instagram and Twitter to post updates about our progess.

More updates will follow

A lot of interesting stuff is happening these days. More posts will follow detailing our activities. We plan on updating our web site more frequently from now on.