25-Nov-2012

Thesis Updates
I've gotten some good work done this week on my Thesis.

• Here is the new CAD concept for the ICARUS Flyer v4-RevA:

This is the new QuadTiltRotor UAV in Cruise Mode.  I decided to use 4 Brushless DC motors that pivot based on independent servo linkages.  The wings and fuselage will be streamlined NACA airfoils, to be decided later.

Here's a shot of the internals.  I'm going to install a RC Receiver, DIYDrones APM, XBee Radio's for telemetry, probably another secondary PCB for other usage, 3500 mAh LiPo battery, 4 ESC's, a PDB Board for the motors and 4 servo's.

And here is a transition from Hover to Cruise.  Each Winglet will be independently actuated and can rotate up to 110 Degrees.

• I'm getting pretty good at Star-CCM.  Star-CCM is an industry-proven CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Software used to model CAD objects in a dynamic environment.  We were given licenses from one of the UIC-AIAA Team's Sponsors, Star-CCM.  Here are some shots of that:

This is a mesh display of an airfoil the AIAA team is using.  

And here is a velocity and pressure diagram of the same airfoil.  I still have a lot to learn about this software but it's coming along.

• Last weekend we started doing some analysis on the APM Board.  We are still going over the raw data to develop a good transfer function for the plane we flew but here is the raw data.  For this experiment we were only able to get one good test flight from the plane.  We tried flying it as much of a controlled experiment we could, including sweeping the pitch and roll axes and even doing a few barrel rolls.  

3-Axis Accelerometer Data.  Nothing too exciting here, except that we were pulling up to almost 4 g's at some points.

3-Axis Gyro Data.  Nothing too crazy here either.  Moving on.

This is where it gets interesting.  Using this data and MatLab we can develop a transfer function for the Pitch, Roll and Yaw movement of the Plane so we can model control functions without having to do real or wind-tunnel tests.  Neat stuff!

• I've pretty much decided on a paper I'm going to write for the AIAA Conference, "The Ideal UAV".  I'm basically going to talk about what the problems are with all the current UAV's being used now as they're all stove-pipe systems, and how we can build better UAV's to make them last longer and cheaper to use.  Here's my abstract, so far:

UAV’s are often designed without regard to their interoperability with other related systems or projected future objectives.  As such there are a variety of standards, architectures and technologies in the UAV industry that have minimal relation to each other .  This paper develops a framework for the Ideal UAV for designing, building, documenting, operating and maintaining an UAV to increase its efficiency and longevity by building upon existing platforms and lessons learned in the commercial UAV community.

Other Stuff

We bought a new car!