UAV Forge kicks off Winter 2017 with our first meeting last Friday.
Our leader, Cheng, has big goals for our teams: to be one of five projects selected to present at the Winter Design Review. Cheng wants to exhibit each of the team’s best work.The project has been making good progress and Cheng believes the team can complete the major tasks to show that our UAV will function as well as we designed it!

There are two major goals for this quarter, the first is to perform a vertical take-off and landing test flight (VTOL) with the tilt-rotor prototype as seen in the picture above. The second goal is to test the initial obstacle avoidance system on the quadcopter prototype.

Each team also has their individual goals that help complete the major goals.

The Propulsion team’s tasks are to test for vehicle vibration, check the vertical orientation of the prototype’s props, and calibrate both the Th-2 mixer microchip and Pixhawk flight controller. The Pixhawk and mixer both need the correct electrical gains so that they both can work simultaneously.

The Mechanical Design team is continuing where they left off. The team will rapid prototyping parts for the Fabrication team and design the internal housing components for the electronics to be mounted inside the prototype plane. Before sending the designs, the team must perform finite element analysis (FEA) tests to ensure each part is structurally sound and provides protection.

The Fabrication team’s goal is to produce multiply prototypes for the project presentation and continue building the plane’s major components.

The Ground Station team is fine tuning their work from last quarter. The team will be cleaning up, organizing and debugging the program to work on the network protocols that are needed communicate with the prototype plane. They have successfully created basic features that function, now they have to integrate to the main project code.
Radio and Communications team is working on a cellphone control test and has three goals to accomplish it. The first goal is to establish the server protocols, the second is test to the cellular network with a SIM card and the third is work on the cell network code so that telecommunication is possible.

Lastly, the Avionics team’s main goal is to get the Pixhawk connection to function and gather real-time test data for controlling the quadcopter for the obstacle avoidance function. To do this, they must integrate the Pixhawk to an Arduino microcontroller and create the obstacle avoidance algorithms. After testing, the team will integrate the hardware that actuate the algorithms, the LiDAR and altimeter.

This is an exciting start and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish this quarter!