With the quarter underway, work has begun again in earnest. With this as the final quarter to complete work, having deadlines for important documentation like the technical report and such closing in, there is not much time for dallying. Each team has quickly turned around following the break and is jumping into action to get their respective tasks and systems functional, mounted, and tested.
Some major issues concerning the costs of travel and lodging for the competition have yet to be resolved. As the competition looms, the urgency of finding funding opportunities that can help foot the multi-thousand dollar bill is ballooning. The team has a created a Zot Funder campaign in an effort to secure funds usable by the team. If interested in donating, the campaign can be found here.
As for progress, another flight test has been scheduled for this Saturday, the 14th of April. On it will be the first wave of mounted components on the Aeroworks GT. They will include the Pixhawk and all other components necessary for collecting telemetry. Structures is in charge of handling the mounting in addition to continuing the design process of a mechanism for dropping the payload.
The Ground Station team has been steadily adding more functionality to their software such as creating a function to add and remove waypoints and saving/loading missions. The software is nearing its final stages and the bulk of the work remaining for the team is ensuring the functionality and speed of the object recognition and localization software.
The Avionics team has been conducting testing on the efficiency of the image transfer system and found that when maintaining line of sight, transfer is operable, however transfer time increases dramatically as distance from home grows. The team is researching turrets and other options for improving transfer rates. They will also be working with the Structures team to mount the first wave of components on the Aeroworks GT.
Moving into the third week, the team is going strong!
UAV Forge Documentations Officer,
Kenzo Spaulding