AERO 401/402
(Capstone Design Course)

In the Fall of 2003 and Spring of 2004, special groups of students were formed in an attempt to UNIFY THE CRCD EXPERIENCE. These students focused their knowledge and experience acquired as students in the CRCD curriculum to integrate intelligent systems with traditional air vehicle design. These students worked to design an intelligent unmanned air vehicle. Students learned pre-concept design in a minds-on, hands-on style: create a mission for an intelligent unmanned air vehicle; define the requirements which enable the mission; assemble the requirements into a formal Request for Proposal (RFP). These students conducted in-depth design in a teaming environment. Going beyond traditional engineering, these seniors developed important project management skills needed to excel in tomorrow's workplace .

Spring 2004 CRCD Capstone Design Team

Specifications:

  • Total Vehicle Weight = 4.5 lb
  • Available Payload Weight = 1.5 lb
  • Wing Span = 14 ft
  • Airfoil: SA7038
  • AR = 15
  • W/S = .35 lb/sq ft
  • L/D = 20
  • Electric engine (lithium polymer batt.) with variable speed, thrust = 1.4 lb
  • V MAX = 31 mph, V STALL = 10 mph
  • Roll control via active wing warping conventional pitch & yaw control

Demonstrated Technologies/Lessons:

  • Wing Warping Control
  • Highly Deformable Wings
  • Fluid-Structure Interaction
  • Composite wing spar
  • Autonomous control
  • AUVSI UAV Student Competition (Summer 2004)
  • Indoor Flight Capabilities

Future:

  • Semi-autonomous
  • Micro-autopilot: onboard 3-axis accels, 3-axis rate gyro, and GPS
  • Position and altitude sensors programmable for waypoints and control laws
  • Distributed Control for Flexible Wings
  • Piezoelectric ® SMA wires ® Micro-servos

Students also worked on developing Autonomous Intelligent Reconfiguration using the Hybrid Simplex-Genetic Algorithm. They attempted to improve and refine existing algorithms, implement hysteretic actuators, extend current actuators from SISO to MIMO Type, expand the Synthetic Jet Actuator Flow Regime, extend low speed results to the high speed regime, evaluate in non-laboratory environment, and fly on UAV testbed.