I'm in my Senior year of Aero engineering now and my senior design course is focusing on Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (
wiki link for those who want to learn).
Our goal is essentially to design from ground up a Micro UAV. The design is for the US Army as they are our "customer". There will be 3 different groups in this class, all competing against each other for the "win". Realistically no one expects us to have a completed design, but they want us to get as close as we can. This course, also known as IPT, has been going on for the last 16 years and each semester builds off the previous semester's work. I think they said the UAV project started in the Fall of last year so this is a new project for our school. My school (UAH) is working with other colleges, one actually in France.
A little more info of what we are doing follows:
The army is wanting to design UAVs that can deploy from a "Mothership" UAV. We're talking a large UAV with many Micro UAVs that come out and then travel into a building for reconnaissance. The MUAV's will have cameras, guidance, control, and feedback systems. The idea is that a soldier in battle can "send" the mothership into flight. The mothership gets to the outside of a building and deploys the micro UAVs into the building for recon. The MUAVs are to weigh no more than 1lb each, have enough battery for a minimum of 15 minute "mission" and still have all the constraints of recon equipment. Think of that... the battery power to have all those things going, but under the weight of 1lb. Never mind the other materials. That's some crazy-*** stuff.
I think this class will be awesome, but it's definately going to cost me alot of free time; especially considering I'm still working and have 2 more classes and one of those additional 2 is
another design course. Ugh!
I'm already doing my research but thought in the off-chance that someone here may know something about it, I'd post it up. If not, oh well,... some of you guys here may think this is just cool enough to make the topic worthwhile. *shrugs*
