Post-Task 1 Debrief

Task 1 Recap:

• Changed ESC yesterday to account for possible ESC issues on failing motor (via 2023-05-05 Practice Flight @ Airstrip & Daily Debrief ). During hover test drone continued to have rear-right motor fail and dip, forcing flight termination

• Happened first time in about 2 min of hover, team came back, removed wings to reduce weight, had the same issue again after 2-3 min of hover

• Realized motors might be failing because VTOL motors aren’t rated to be run at 100% throttle for continuous amounts of time since they transition.

  • the spec is “full current for 3 minutes”

  • we assumed we’d transition so didn’t need to worry about this

Solutions Brainstorming:

• Deduced that high drone weight as well as continuous motor operation at high throttle causing problems

• Will be shaving a lot of weight off the Icarus aircraft in order to reduce load on motors, ditch quadplane/transition mode

  • Remove tail-section

  • Remove pusher prop

  • Remove mid-wings

  • Shave aluminum down

  • Aim to reduce weight to <10 kg

• Find other motors to increase thrust and prevent VTOL motor overheating (perhaps Vanny motors) in 6 or 8-motor configuration. Can also use just 4 Vanny motors

• If sub 6 kg, use Vanny motors, otherweise see if we can use other motors from other teams

Action Items

• @Megan Spee @Conall Kingshott @Nathan Green @Anthony Luo : Working on shaving off aircraft weight

• @Ethan Abraham looking at datasheet for VTOL as well as Vanny motors to see thrust and continuous operation characteristics

• @Dhruv Upadhyay @Hamza Ali @Ayoung Eun : Working on post-flight report

• @Aidan Bowers (Deactivated) : Working on log analysis and graphs

During flight test notes - the rear right motor was pinned at full throttle (about 95% as described before). Trying to maintain yaw. this was evident in the torquing of the entire frame as well - rear right and front left were noticeably higher than the other corners of the frame.

Both rear right and front left were warmer than normal after landed->disarm. Rear right was a lot hotter. ESCs felt fine and normal.

No ventilation on the motors as they are covered. Drone is very overweight from what we anticipated. Consistently taking off into the wind has given us lots of data on the motor thrust from this takeoff point, and consistently the rear right motor is maxed out.

Warm weather makes it fail faster. In the cold it lasts longer (4:30 min in 1 deg vs … 1:30 or 2 min in 20 deg + sun + wind).