ESE 4500/4510: Electrical Engineering Senior Design
Goals:
- VTOL with forward flight → fixed-wing tail-sitter bicopter, capable of transitioning between “glider” mode that uses the fixed wings to travel longer distances, and “copter” mode that uses the rotors vertically to hover.
- Aerial-aquatic → waterproof, neutrally buoyant with an appropriate CG to allow maneuverability underwater.
My focus:
- Everything mechanical.
- Airframe design: wing and body design to fit avionics, elevon actuation methods. Iterating on this as our stability requirements changed (ex: we switched to a larger battery, which pushed our CG backwards. This required designing a new body and enlarging the elevons to regain stability).
- Manufacture, and iterating/experimenting with different 3D print methods and materials.
- Motor and propellor research and analysis, based on estimated thrust requirements.
- Waterproofing. Experimenting with rubber, epoxy, and silicone sealants, and TPU 3D prints in early versions.
- Buoyancy and weight distribution adjustments to enable swimming.
- Tuning PID controller for vertical and horizontal flight modes. Mostly based on observation.
Below are clips of the drone flying and swimming:
Final presentation:
Note: “glider” mode clips are not shown because it’s hard to find safe open fields in the middle of Philadelphia 😬. We tried it once, it worked, and we never got the chance to try again.
All in all… this project was a ride. Took up a huge portion of my senior year, but it was a great reminder of a few things:
- First principles always persist, and using them to do basic analysis at the beginning can illuminate a lot.
- Well-designed experiments are critical.
- Iterative/experiment-heavy work only makes sense if each iteration has clear goals and rationale behind it.