School year
The competition
Autonomy, by their definition, is acting independently. ARC asks students to build a quadcopter, four electric motors and propellers, that can do that.
- 01
AUTO
Autonomous flight
The weight of the competition. Students program a quadcopter to fly a mission with no pilot. The tasks change each year. The programming is the skill aerospace employers ask for.
- 02
PILOT
Semi-autonomous flight
Head-to-head, student-piloted. The vehicle still needs code to stay in the air, and the round is decided in the moment rather than entirely before the match.
- 03
PANEL
Technical communication
Teams present the vehicle, the team, the analysis, and the competition plan to a panel. Content and style both count. The design of the aircraft and the plan are where a team shows its own thinking.
- 04
DEBRIEF
Ethical consideration
On competition day, teams answer real-world vignettes and present the response. The Saint Anselm Center for Ethics in Society supplies the lectures that prepare them.
How the season runs
The rulebook comes out in August. Teams of three to five, sometimes two, work benchmarks through fall and winter. In spring each region hosts the four scored rounds.
Scoring clarifications
- Propellers may not exceed 14 inches in diameter. STEM-ED says to ignore the discrepancy in the Technical Inspection Rubric.
- A team scores the whale-tag task (Mission 2 Task 3) if the drone holds a tag while in the air, either lifted from the ground or carried from takeoff.
Every rule is in the rulebook
The regional and national rulebooks, the field kit guide, the kit list, and the rubric are all on the resources page.