Its been a while since our last blog but to recap we won the Deans Choice Award. There were over 40 MAE projects at Winter Design Review and we were one of few to receive the award. Since then we have started to build a whole new VTOL platform. With an addition of about 10 new mechanical engineer members, we have them each working on a specific component of the new plan such as creating the fuselage skin from fiberglass and creating a balsa ribbed hollow plane. For our control vision and AI team, they have successfully built a stereo cam and are now fine tuning. The point of the stereo cam is to give us better feedback than a Lidar would, but the downside to it is that it won’t have a 360 view. The software team is building a deliverable ground station this quarter. They’ve built a prototype before but this quarter it should be finalized and up and running. Overall though we did hit this quarter running and our deliverable goal for spring design review is going to be a working VTOL plane.

By Jose Ortega, UAV Forge