UAV Forge has had some interesting developments so far!

The Propulsion team has been performing tilt-rotor spiral mode analysis to find ways to control how the plane moves. In addition, they want to create a new gimbal and test bench to experimentally prove their research ideas.

The Mechanical Design team is working on designing three parts of the plane. First, they are creating a second iteration of the tilt rotor assembly, second, they are designing a tilting mechanism for actual rotors, and third, they are changing plane’s frame dimensions and joint connections so it can fit inside a curved fuselage.

The Fabrication team still manufacturing the plane’s wings and they will attach the finished product on the spar. They have been practicing covering the wings with monokote film.

The Ground Station has created the first prototype of the GUI program and they are working to update the network simulator. The program currently allows users to set a permanent static path but the team wants to enable the user “interrupt” the plane’s path.

Finally, the Avionics team is installing and connecting the plane’s sensors with ESC software and they have designed a wiring diagram to connect the tiler rotors to an Arduino micro-controller and servo.

The project is coming along nicely and quickly! Now that midterms have passed, we’ll be seeing even more progress in Week 7 or so.