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While all aerospace engineering students at Iowa State are required to do a two-semester capstone project their senior year, I applied to the Boeing-funded session for a more in-depth experience working closely with industry leaders and clients. I was accepted into the program due to my academic achievements, and soon I was on a flight to Atlanta with my peers to be introduced to the project I would be working on over the next year. There, I was placed into a team with members from two other universities; Perdue and Tuskegee. Our task was to design and deliver a fixed-wing drone that fit within certain size and weight parameters, but beyond that we had to create our own mission that would solve a problem that our stakeholders needed solved. After brainstorming and reaching out to directors at FEMA and the National Guard, we set out to create a drone that could deliver a communications device to stranded survivors after a natural disaster, so recipients could communicate their need level, and responders like FEMA could assess where help was needed first.
The task seemed straightforward, but juggling stakeholder requirements, design challenges, and working with a team spread across time zones created an interesting challenge. Thankfully, our team was assigned an industry professional from Boeing to teach us more about project management, and guide us on design decisions. As part of the team, I helped with flight controls and autonomy to assess the stability of our aircraft and program autonomous flight. I also helped in the design and manufacture of many parts of our aircraft, such as electrical components, the tail, and overall assembly.
If you are interested to learn more about this project, below are links to the intermediate and final design reports my team and I created:
To the right are a photo of my team, a video my groupmate made of our flight testing, a build photo of me applying epoxy resin to our frame, and a photo of our final aircraft.
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