Control update: ICMTC 2026, 3rd place and best mission performance

We placed 3rd overall at ICMTC 2026 and took best mission performance. Mission 1 is the flight worth writing about.

It was a single-lap, 9-waypoint autonomous route with a mid-mission payload drop, flown on the same rate-controller gains from earlier in the season and the script stack described above.

Mission 1

• Duration: 538.2 s
• Distance flown: 1.72 km
• Max altitude: 46.99 m
• Altitude tracking: 0.12 m RMSE, the tightest we saw all season
• Waypoint accuracy: ~7.5 m average error, well inside the competition’s 30 m tolerance
• Landed safely

Because if there’s one thing this flight proved, it’s that the controller isn’t the bottleneck anymore. 0.12 m of altitude tracking under real competition conditions is about as tight as it gets.