GeoSurv II Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: A major undergraduate project with

Abstract

A final year undergraduate capstone design project was run in 2010-2011 and involved 32 students, 8 lead engineers and a project manager. The project was to design, develop and build an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can be used for geophysical surveying and was carried out in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University. It built upon previous years work and involved students mostly from the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering BEng programs. However, there was cross-department input, with students from the BEng programs Computer and Systems Engineering, Software Engineering and Communication Engineering, who undertook their final year project working on the avionics. Students were split into groups with lead engineers guiding the groups and individuals, plus there was an overall project manager. The groups were aerodynamics, avionics, flight test, integration and structures. The lead engineers were faculty, sessional lecturers and one graduate student teaching assistant. Sessional lecturers brought experience from the military and government research laboratories. Individual groups met weekly and additionally all students from all groups met collectively, again weekly, to share and discuss progress and issues. Students were required to produce design reports, as well as a group final report and each term a formal design review. Besides the development of GeoSurv II a new UAV design, named Corvus, was started and 10 students, drawn from across the different groups, worked on the preliminary design with the aim to produce a demonstrator vehicle. This paper describes the organization and running of such a large, multidisciplined group project as well as giving details of student opinions taken throughout the project's progress over the academic year.