2019 AlphaPilot teams announced

Lockheed Martin and Drone Racing League (DRL) have announced the nine teams that have been accepted into the 2019 AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge.

The teams have earned a spot in DRL's inaugural autonomous UAS racing series, the Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit, which kicks off later in 2019. 

The nine AlphaPilot teams are ICARUS from Atlanta, Georgia; Formula Drone from Los Angeles, California; KEF Robotics from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; MAVLab from Delft, the Netherlands; TEAM USRG @ KAIST from Daejeon, South Korea; Team Puffin with four team members from the US, Sweden and Australia; UZH Robotics and Perception Group from Zurich, Switzerland; Warsaw MIMotaurs from Warsaw, Poland, and XQuad from Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The teams will compete to design an AI framework capable of piloting racing UAS through high-speed aerial courses without any GPS, data relay or human intervention. AlphaPilot teams will battle it out during AIRR's inaugural, four-event season later in 2019 for a chance at winning a $1 million cash prize, sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

An additional $250,000 reward will be given to the first team whose autonomous UAS pushes the limits of performance between human and machine, and bests a human-piloted UAS.

The AlphaPilot Challenge launched in November on the HeroX platform, attracting 424 teams from 81 countries. Teams competed in a series of qualification tests in spring 2019. A panel of industry experts evaluated their technical strategy and abilities in developing image-classification algorithms and performing in simulated racing environments.