HoverGames 3 Takes Off

Nov. 2, 2022

This year, the HoverGames competition has a drone and car platform.

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HoverGames is starting up their third competition. This year's challenge is Sustainable Food Ecosystems. It has added a rover, the Buggy3, to the drone used in the original competition (see figure). To find out more about the latest competition and hardware, I talked with NXP's Iain Galloway.

The PX4 controller (top left) can now be combined with the NavQ+ (lower left) that's built around NXP's i.MX 8M Plus SoC. These can control the new Buggy3 (center) or the HoverGames drone (top right).

The new Buggy3 and existing HoverGames drone are normally controlled by the RDDRONE-FMUK66 PX4-based nav system. The new addition is the NavQ+, which is based on NXP's i.MX 8M Plus system-on-chip. This has AI acceleration and hooks for cameras. All of the software is open source.

The competition is a bit opened and while the kits can be purchased by anyone, those provided for the competition are based on proposals that need to be submitted now. The idea is to show the feasibility of ideas rather than complete working solutions.

Bosch Sensortec also has signed on to the competition. It's providing the BME688 gas sensor, but this is more than just a simple sensor. It has its own on-chip AI acceleration that can be trained to identify different gases.

HoverGames has extensive online documentation in addition to that found on the company site as well as sites like the PX4 autopilot. The hackters.io site manages the latest HoverGames 3 challenge. Prior competition entries can be viewed as well.

Stay tuned for more upcoming videos on HoverGames 3.

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William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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