On October, 7 Ekaterinburg has hosted the solemn closing of the IV National championship of working professions from high-tech industries (WorldSkills Hi-Tech) 2017 where the best young professionals were awarded for their outstanding skills.

For the first time the top position in the competence "Driving of unmanned aerial vehicles" was taken by a representative of the MEPhI Engineering Center Vladimir Voronin with the support of his compatriots Vitaly Kostarev.

This year MEPhI was actively involved in the global WorldSkills movement, and the University qualifying championship under WorldSkills standards, held in October, showed a high level of students and experts training. According to the results of the championship representatives of the Engineering science center MEPhI V. Voronin (master degree student at the Department №81) and V. Kostarev (postgraduate student of the Department №81) were invited to participate in the National Championship Hi-Tech in controlling of unmanned aerial vehicles part.

WorldSkills Hi-Tech is the annual finale of the series of WorldSkills competitions where the best specialists in high-tech sectors including Rosatom, Rostec, Russian Space Agency, Rosneft, Rostelecom, Rosseti, Russian Railways and others competed in 30 fields.

The competition task in the skill "Control of UAV" consisted of three parts: the elimination of defects of the drone, piloting and creation of 3D models from images taken with a copter. The contestants were asked to find 10 faults, predetermined by the experts, but after a careful examination Vladimir Voronin found 32; moreover one of them was critical, and the experts didn’t notice it.

Ultimately, judges were forced to stop the contest time of our engineer and asked him to eliminate these defects, as they didn’t find better specialist. Five minutes before the end of normal time the copter gained excessive height and then dropped on a concrete floor from a height of about 5 meters due to momentary loss of control. The frame was broken in many places. Vladimir had to completely disassemble the unit and assemble it from scratch. And he not only kept within the allotted time, but managed to hold a trial flight.

Performance of Vladimir Voronin at the WorldSkills Hi-Tech was a very bright, professional and aroused great interest among experts, press and visitors.

The competence of "Control of unmanned aerial vehicles" is a part of the WorldSkills for the first time and only in Russia, therefore, obtained experience at the WorldSkills Hi-Tech will be used for the international promotion of achievements of Russia in this field of engineering training.

We congratulate our team on a deserved victory and wish them further professional growth and success!