Revisiting the paper helicopter project using an adaptive surrogate-based approach

The paper helicopter project has been given to graduate students of the French engineering school Ecole des Mines de Saint Etienne, as a practical work of two lectures: design of experiments and global optimization. The project consists of designing a very simplified paper helicopter for maximum flying time. Its main difficulty lies in the very high level of uncertainty, as flying times for the same design can vary very substantially due to experimental conditions or manufacturing imprecisions. The students were asked to combine design of experiments and surrogate modeling techniques (in order to deal with noise) with global optimization strategies. Despite its apparent simplicity, the project was found quite challenging and the strategies experimented by students were eventually close to what would require a real-case problem.