We’re onto Week 6! The FWMAV team continues to work hard towards our goals.

Here are the accomplishments for the week:

The mechanical design team is continuing the design of our new ULB prototype. We created a new chassis for the new gears and redesigned the linkages. We also decided to use acrylic sheets for the linkages and ordered the required materials. For our other prototype, we are continuing the fabrication of the base, which we are experiencing problems with the supporting material from 3D printing, and the testing of the new optimized linkages, which is going well so far.

The quadflapper team built a new QF frame, which boasts a 5.74g mass decrease, less vibration, and more structural integrity. We are currently experimenting with it. Regarding our PID troubleshooting, we discovered that we cannot add an external blackbox to micro flight board and that all the external blackboxes are too slow. Hence, our options are to use a larger flight controller and use an internal memory chip. We have received advice to removing FC all together to remove pids, and use transmitter mapping and external speed controllers instead. We will continue to experiment and troubleshoot our designs this week.

The systems identification has completed fabrication of the main assembly for our experiment set-up. The design is robust and multi-functional. We will be ordering more materials and finishing up the complete structure in the next weeks.