The Winter Quarter was overall a success. With the Sig-T prototype achieving a full autonomous flight, take-off, and landing, all while taking photos of the ground. An almost ready to fly kit was also purchased and was constructed over the Spring Break, and already achieved manual flight. But despite the significant progress, the next two months will be packed with work to finish and optimize all systems and requirements for the AUVSI SUAS competition.

As with the beginning of the Winter quarter, there has been a slight change in leadership this quarter. DeQuan Zhong will replace Kristen Okano as the Chief Engineer of MAE. Kristen will take over DeQuan’s position of being team lead for the Structures team. In addition to being in the Avionics team, Richard Carla will now also be the Technical Documentation Officer. He will work with the Chief Engineers to write technical paper and other technical documents.

The Structures team will be mounting avionics on and testing the Aero GT competition plane. They will concurrently be designing and manufacturing a mechanism to ferry and release the water bottle payload specified in the competition.

The Avionics team will be conducting testing and verification with the goal of having all on board systems functional (on the ground) by the end of week three. These systems include the image capture and transfer system as well as the Pixhawk II and the components necessary for autonomous flight.

This quarter is shaping up to be successful and with the nearing competition deadlines, UAV Forge could very well be one of the top 5 teams to compete in the AUVSI SUAS competition.

UAV Forge Documentations Officer,

Kenzo Spaulding