Competition Design Outline
- Hamza Ali
Status | PROTOTYPE |
Owner | @Hamza Ali |
|---|---|
Contributors | @Aidan Bowers (Deactivated) @Megan Spee @Anthony Luo |
Decision | The design outline that we have is not just subject to change, it is expected to change slightly, if not significantly as more testing and prototyping happens and we get more experience with building an aircraft tailored to the upcoming competition, and get more experience with new technology (Autonomous flight, 1.3 GHz, VTOL, etc.) This preliminary design outline has been created to help streamline the current decisions that have been made, and some of the core reasoning behind the decisions. |
On this page |
Expectations
This year’s competition has a large focus on creating a model air taxi with themes of realism. This is shown with the emphasis on awarding points for realism, size and weight constraints, and the requirement to be able to handle scale barbie dolls within our aircraft.
Current Ideas
Our current aircraft is a VTOL hybrid — a traditional fixed-wing aircraft merged with a quadcopter. Task 1 expects a flight distance of approximately 30km in the span of 30-45 minutes, meaning we need to aim for an aircraft that has both, speed and endurance. VTOL gives us the chance to land in space-constrained areas, as the CONOPS outline the presence of obstacles within 2m of landing pads.
Moving Forward
Having concrete goals for outcomes from early testing will help us tweak and improve our current design and mitigate flaws with our design.
Here’s a preliminary list of concerns that need further investigation:
Attempting to meet a 5kg weight limit (for bonus points) while still meeting other requirements
Testing techniques for achieving longer flight time with the use of multiple batteries
Range testing and flying up to 5km away from the aircraft autonomously and using FPV
Mechanical
Airframe
Accommodating 2-6 Passengers
Ideally we want to be able to support 6 passengers in a realistic configuration, and prototyping potential frames will be another challenge for the mech team to take on and play with.
Embedded Flight Systems \ Computer Vision
Emphasis on autonomous tasks:
A big push from firmware moving forward will be to try to integrate ZeroPilot into a working aircraft, which can potentially be trialed and competition.
While we intend to still have an ArduPilot failsafe, it would be good to start having the chance to have our own home-grown firmware for auto-take-ff, auto landing, and get the chance to actually get ZeroPilot in the air.
Autonomous waypoint finding is also going to be a source of points that we will be able to achieve during the competition.
Landing
We also want to try to push to try to get automatic landing. This could be a combination of using GPS to find the approximate/rough landing position and then handing it off to CV to detect the landing pad live and fly itself down.