When they brought home a trophy from their first competition, did the original UBC AeroDesign members imagine that their project would be still alive today?
21 years after the team’s first showcase at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Design Competition, the team takes a further step in a completely new direction. Starting in September, UBC AeroDesign is merging with the UBC UAV Thunderbirds Team to build a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
The UAV Thunderbirds Team was founded just last year, in hopes of attending the Unmanned Systems Canada’s Student Competition in Alma, QC. The competition aims to encourage research and innovation among post-secondary students in the unmanned vehicle sector. The challenge entails building an aircraft that will fly over a area, capture image data to be transmitted, and finally processed in order to identify the location of smoke, people, and various colour targets. The goal is for the entire system, from flight to image recognition, to be fully automated. Last year, the UAV Thunderbird team built a fully-functional on-board electrical system, developed an image recognition programme, and made modifications to a hobby aircraft, which they presented at the 2013 competition.
“We attended to the competition more as observers last year”, says Mireille Ghoussoub, Chief Design Officer of the UAV, “Many of the teams were working with over 10 years of student experience. Attending the competition was a great learning opportunity that allowed us to develop a strategy that will make us competitive for next year”. One of the goals for this year is to perform as many flight tests as possible prior to the competition, a challenge for UBC AeroDesign that will be building an autonomous aircraft for the first time.
The UAV Thunderbirds’ members are from electrical engineering, computer engineering, and Engineering Physics, and so the merge with UBC Aerodesign will provide an excellent opportunity for students to share their knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment.
“We definitely have enough knowledge base to build such an aircraft”, says Ersagun Elacmaz, Chief Administrative Officer of UBC AeroDesign. “Over the past 21 years, we have designed different types of aircraft and some actually had limited autonomous features. I do not think we will have any troubles in the structural design and construction, but autonomous control will be something new for us as well”.
On the other hand, the team became 8th out of 39 teams in the SAE Aero Design Competition – East in the past March. “The team was attending to the Western Competition in the past years” says Antonio Peralta, Chief Design Officer of SAE Freighter Aircraft. “However The Eastern Competition is more competitive with attendance of more established universities with separate aerospace programs and diverse backgrounds. We had some operational mishaps this year that costed us being the 8th place only. We could have done better this year, but we learnt a lot from the competition. Now we are looking forward to fix our mistakes from last year and design a better aircraft to clinch a higher result.”
The team will need lots of dedicated new members to which the diverse knowledge base can be conveyed, in order to ensure the team’s continued success in years to come. Ersagun Elacmaz says “The team offers variety of skills and opportunities to its members and an exciting year is coming up with all these new developments. It is going to be a year of learning for all team members, both new and experienced”.
For more information, visit www.ubcaerodesign.com!
-UBC AeroDesign