Applying Physics to an Undergraduate Design for an Unmanned Aerial System

Abstract

The Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy requires its graduates to complete an integrative capstone design in their senior year. One of these projects involves the design, construction, testing, and demonstration of a small, highly autonomous, unmanned aerial system (UAS). This particular capstone option was added to the list of available capstone projects in the fall of 2005. In the past, while students have been able to complete the design process relatively well, an area of deficiency for all capstone design teams has been the physical modeling of their design before construction. This paper describes the progression of physical modeling and analysis for the systems' air vehicles over the course of the three years of the project's existence. In the first year, the two teams did little or no modeling. During the second year of the project, with three different teams, some modeling was attempted, but not verified through testing once the designs were constructed. At the start of the third year, one of the faculty advisors developed a detailed procedure for aerodynamic modeling and performance analysis, called the ‘Alpha .60 Laboratory’. To augment the previous year's design pedagogy with an inductive learning component, the students were required to complete the laboratory on an existing airframe. They were then required to apply the same analysis to each alternative developed through the engineering design process. Upon selection and construction of their final design, the students were required to validate their analytical predictions through flight testing. Preliminary results have shown marked improvement in the detail of the analysis and the level of the students' understanding of the underlying physics. An assessment of the laboratory's impact on the following year's designs is also presented.