UAV Forge placed in the top four teams in the Winter Peer Review. As a result, the team will present at the Winter Design Review to the Dean of Engineering, alumni, and industry representatives. Preparations and plans for traveling to Maryland for the competition. Due to the large expense of travel, fundraising plans are being drafted to allow team members to go and conduct the mission and presentation. The fifth flight test is scheduled to take place this coming weekend. There the project will be able to test the optimizations and corrections made since the previous flight test. Due to complications with purchasing the chosen competition kit plane, an Aeroworks trainer 200-300cc, research to find a vendor or organization that is selling the plane is being done. However as a result of the popularity of the plane and the closing of the company that produced them, it has been difficult to find a seller.

The Ground Station team has fixed the UAV flight path functionality, which had broken previously. A display of relative altitude was also created as this was determined to be very important following past tests. Internal storage issues were also resolved as there had been some problems previously. Unfortunately, the photos taken during the previous flight test were not usable by the Ground Station team for testing so corrections in iso, shutter speed, and aperture will be made for the next test.

The Structures team has been deciding on strategies to both create a functional platform for releasing the payload (an 8 oz. water bottle) remotely and to mount the remaining avionics components to the Sig-T prototype plane. The team has been working closely with the Avionics team to ensure the changes are made and mounting occurs without hitch.

The Aerodynamics and Propulsion teams have been looking into the availability of a wind tunnel on campus to conduct an experiment based off an AIAA paper to estimate the endurance of the plane based off of efficiency data found in the experiment.

Over all, the project has been moving forward smoothly and steadily. With midterms almost entirely over, members are doubling down to ensure that the progress goals set for this quarter are met and in some ways surpass them.

UAV Forge Documentation Officer,

Kenzo Spaulding