icarusLabs: An Adventure in Crowdsourcing
From September 2011 through May 2012, icarusLabs competed in the UAVForge Competition, sponsored by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The objective of the competition was to design and build a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could complete a local surveillance mission. A unique feature of the competition was an experimental crowdsourcing model, in which competing teams were able to provide technical feedback to each other as part of the design process. The icarusLabs team's solution to the challenge combined a tricopter and blended wing body aircraft into a single hybrid airframe. This paper presents the rationale and theory behind the design as well as the lessons learned from the technical and logistical challenges faced. In addition, the authors reflect on the crowdsourcing aspect of the challenge from a competitor's perspective. Overall, incentives for individual teams' success directly conflicted with the essence of crowdsourcing, but the competition was successful at stimulating interest to fill a void in current UAV solutions, bringing together passionate individuals from the global unmanned systems community, and generating a broad range of novel approaches to address the presented challenges.