The team faces a major deadline along with a few smaller, and in some cases self-imposed, due dates. The major deadline is the technical report, which is to be turned in no later than the fourth of May, along with the much smaller fact sheet (which asks for some simple data about the competition plane), and will be worth 20% of the project’s total competition grade. As the report requires data and information regarding the UAV and all interacting systems, the team is scrambling to ensure the accuracy of the paper, including the projected components and software to be implemented. As the project has received some funding from UROP, the abstract for the symposium is due. The team also has been pushing to finalize housing and transportation to the competition in Maryland to ensure the project’s ability to compete.

In other news, the Ground Station team has added key functions to be able to quickly add and remove waypoints to a mission in their software, G. Station. The team has also included functions to change speeds, and waypoint parameters, like yaw angle, command type, and altitude. The team will be working with the other teams to research servo outputting for the airdrop structure and solve a yaw dampening problem discovered during an aborted automated takeoff. The problem is believed to be from QGroundControl but research to solve the issue is underway.

The structures team has been working hard on concept generation for the air delivery mechanism. The team has decided upon using a pin release set-up and are working with Avionics to design a circuit to use with either an actuator or servo. The team is also mounting the avionics systems with CG calculations in order to have all systems mounted for the third flight test.

The Avionics team is continuing their research on improving the image transfer speed and have reached out to companies hoping for a sponsorship for an antenna(s). Additionally, they are working hard to tabulate and write their data for the technical report.

With major and minor deadlines approaching, the project is powering through the large amount of work required to have the Aeroworks GT competition plane bug free and capable of completing any mission competently and successfully.

UAV Forge documentations officer,

Kenzo Spaulding