The PC/104 Embedded Consortium has announced (PDF format) the winners of their 2004 design contest. The winner in the commercial category was SavantSense, a multi-channel data acquisition, processing, and storage unit. More interesting was the winner of the research category: the USC AVATAR Project. The AVATAR UAV is a robot helicopter designed around dual PC/104 stacks that provide GPS waypoint navigation, autonomous vision-based landing, autonomous sensor-based take-off, and image processing. Judges at this year's contest included Steve Ciarcia and our own Roger Arrick.