International Aerial Robotics Competition
The first mission to move a metallic disc from one side of an arena to another with a completely autonomous flying robot was seen by many as almost impossible. The college teams continued to improve their entries over the next two years when the competition saw its first autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing by a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Three years later in 1995 a team from Stanford University was able to acquire a single disk and move it from one side of the arena to the other in a fully autonomous flight - half a decade earlier than some pundits had predicted.
Below is a video from PBS' Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. (Season 7, episode 5, "RoboFlyers") Alda visited the IARC in 1995 and his camera crew was present when Stanford University completed Mission 1.
California Polytechnic State University: San Luis Obispo, California, United States Georgia Institute of Technology (3 teams): Atlanta, Georgia, United States LeTourneau University: Longview, Texas, United States Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Southern College of Technology: Marietta, Georgia, United States Stanford University: Stanford, California, United States
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH): Zürich, Switzerland
Technische Universität Berlin: Berlin, Germany United States Naval Academy: Annapolis, Maryland, United States Univeristy of Texas at Arlington: Arlington, Texas, United States
University of British Columbia: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada University of Dayton: Dayton, Ohio, United States University of Ottawa: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada University of Southern California: Los Angeles, California, United States