Two university students residing in Turkey achieved first place in the Artificial Intelligence in Aviation competition (Havacılıkta Yapay Zeka Yarışması) held during the TEKNOFEST aerospace and technology festival. The prize was won by Abdullah Osama, a fourth-year mechatronics engineering student at Yıldız Technical University (YTÜ) from Egypt, and his Syrian colleague Talal Bakour, a mathematics engineering graduate, after a competition that lasted about six to seven months between the application and final stages.
Project Details and Technical Challenges
The winning project included three main tasks relying on advanced computer vision and data processing algorithms:
- First Task: Detecting and accurately identifying people and vehicles, a technology with potential applications in security and traffic management fields.
- Second Task: Estimating the location and coordinates of an unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) in the event of a GPS signal loss, contributing to guiding aircraft in complex operational environments such as military operation conditions.
- Third Task: Identifying various elements and components based on the visual processing of the provided images.
Abdullah Osama noted that the most prominent challenge was represented in the final stage, where a ban on internet usage was imposed and the competition was distributed over four separate sessions, each lasting one hour, after the team qualified through the preliminary phase held electronically.
Why This News Matters
This achievement represents a practical model for the integration of international technical competencies into the innovation and research and development ecosystem of the Turkish defense industry sector. The technical importance of the project lies in its handling of critical operational challenges such as reliable offline reliance on local algorithms and securing aerial navigation for drones when GPS signals are lost. This success was crowned by the team securing a promising internship opportunity at Baykar, a company specializing in drone manufacturing, as preparation for actual engagement in projects within the Turkish defense sector.