2025-01-06 W25 Programme Sync
- Georgia Westerlund
- Daniel Puratich
Introduction
Attendance
@Georgia Westerlund
@Daniel Puratich
@Nathan Green
@Evan Janakievski
@Meghan Dang
@Roni Kant
@Ryan Scomazzon
@Derek Tang
@Smile Khatri
@Alison Thompson
@Maxwell Lou
@Emma Chan
@Megan Spee
@Tong Zhang
Preface
Meeting is intended for leadership team to align on the path forward toward competition and beyond.
All are welcome to attend this meeting to give opinions and listen in!
This is the first meeting on W25 and it’s outcomes will be used to drive timelines for all subteams for all programmes for the coming term.
Director an lead syncs occur after this and will focus on how individual subteams fit into this picture.
Competition Logistics
Comp Roster Selection
Members will be asked to fill out the following form: WARG Competition Participant Interest Form
Please review and let us know if there are any concerns
Form will be announced in next week’s Weekly Bulletin
Will remain open until 23:59 EST on January 31st
Roster selection discussion will begin during the following Leads meeting
Further details will be discussed next week 2025-01-14 Comp Logistics Sync
Any comments or concerns here?
Comp Logistics Sync
Happening during Leads meeting slot next week → Tuesday, Jan 14 @ 9pm EST
Will discuss the roster selection in more detail
Will discuss comp logistic timelines for this term
All are encouraged to attend!
AEAC Phase 1
Design paper is due January 15 @ 5 PM EST
Links can be found here
Aiming to have a first draft completed by this Friday
Looking for support from people on autonomy to write the mapping sections
Please let me know if you’d like to help out!
AEAC Phase 2
Task 1: Approach
New Testing Airframe
Thoughts on using a secondary airframe, something Houston sized (smaller than peggy), for Task 1?
Multiple airframes is allowed for comp
Derisks Task 1 by using a cheaper airframe for testing and at competition
Allows us to remove autonomy system from Pegasus
Bringing up a CF airframe, 7” or 10” prop range, could allow us to learn how to tune as well
Houston’s current plastic airframe is very vibey and makes tuning difficult.
Is it too late to bring up a new airframe?
there are a lot of things to do here so bandwidth limits could kick in, like we don’t really have time to do our own design for this
Could lower mechanical effort with a COTS airframe such as https://holybro.com/products/px4-development-kit-x500-v2 .
Kind of against this on principle, against spirit of what we want to do with respect to Team Charter
Just use the dev kit to learn tuning and test autonomy and NOT use it at competition.
We have two Pegasus airframes right now so could use one for task one and other for task two
downside is the cost of pegasus airframe is a risk when we talk about learning how to do tuning
this is viable for competition potentially
transporting multiple airframes is not optimal
task one is very low risk so justification is weak here
just doing one peggy at comp seems best
Effort going into learning how to tune and learning how to bring up the airframe on this new dev kit
this is essentially a new program, but should be worth
this is important for competition
December 14th FT reveals importance of tuning for this system!
Falls under EFS maybe?
Are there any DRIs available for this?
Timeline for learning how to tune:
we need good tunes for competition
end of January to have some experimenting with tuning under our belt
learn to tune on the COTS airframe early on
@Derek Tang @Roni Kant to ask if they have interested members to get involved here
we can follow up in
@Evan Janakievski can help out on weekends
@Nathan Green @Georgia Westerlund to order dev kit
https://holybro.com/products/px4-development-kit-x500-v2 comes with everything except FC and GPS which we have already
ideally we dont have to take any houston/dallas parts
success criteria? specified in flight test documentation
How to methodically tune any ArduCopter is a really good starting place we should try following
Autonomy Software
Autonomy System Flight Testing Schedule
Definition of minimum viable system should be aligned upon
what have we done since last term?
we have individual portions coded, putting it together needs to work
Follow up next comp sync after director sync will be ideal
Task 2: Pegasus Payload Redesign
Water System Improvements
December 14th FT revealed some challenges with the current system (fixed pump solution).
Scoop solution has been ruled out due to leaking issues.
What is path forward toward mechanical solution
Fixing leaks in tank
concept: remove necessity of landing on barrel by hanging pump and tube on a winch that hangs down below the drone
more mech engineering time
test pumps ability to pump upwards while engineering this solution
datasheet says 3.5m max lift height
want this to hang down ~ 1 meter ? TBD
siphon effects should be considered
look into the valve on servo thing
and other effects
gravity
shouldn’t run pump dry for extended periods of time
derisks crashing at competition
EE requirements
would require a servo for the winch in addition to the in and out pump
servo is simple
avoid scope creep in water controller might be nice
concept: improve tuning and see if landing is still viable
still sketchy because of wind and snag points on the frame and barrel
Tuning
Pegasus 2 tuning plan.
Need to do more learning here, see above section
might be hard to tune if we have payload of varying weight (water weight) underneath
Eclipse Fixed Wing Timeline
Pilot training foam plane timelines
@Jerry Tian @Manasva Katyal are not here, but the timelines need to be pushed
Mechanical simulation: is it overweight?
3.8kg on frame
no empenage
has batts and motors
no other electronics
weight will likely exceed 5kg
wing
wing area was increased
motor is large
manufacturing with wings is going to be difficult knowledge transfer wise
frame
components exist for it, mostly putting it together
new tailboom
timeline
end of january might be a stretch, maybe close, to finish mech wise
end of February is safer
there’s too many people to assign to just pegasus on this team so eclipse is good to assign people to as a backburner R&D project
VTOL Plan
Not start on it this term
because eclipse is behind.
getting eclipse to fly this term is important to unblock doing vtol
If this is something we are going to be doing then it will need more attention following the eclipse program. Else we will need to focus on maintaining a quadcopter platform into 2026 competition?
Current director’s will all be stepping down post comp so our efforts toward managing VTOL will be minimal, either the next generation should step up into this program or we should align on not driving it.
is there interest in doing this as a program?
doing it is very difficult and people need to be passionate about it to even stand a chance
this is kind of an open team direction question
mech interest form
most ppl said they want to work on vtol on mech
ee involvement in airside
eclipse and vtol have more ee opportunity baked in
regular members like the idea, directors are kind of on board, what we are looking for are those kind of middle people (upcoming leads, senior members, etc) who are going to become owners of the programs and be there to drive meetings etc.
we want to tell you guys this is the time/opportunity for if you are interested to start taking ownership!
if we dont do VTOL, what do we do?
is doing another multirotor
Are we done with multi-rotor?
we need to get good at tuning
flying pegasus is still scary
need something new to keep senior members interested
maybe doesn’t need to be for competition
VTOL could be an R&D thing
summer term is a good time
scope vtol properly at end of this term
make scale of VTOL be smaller than ICARUS
can be kept around as an R&D project