Systems integration in a UAS design. An example of undergraduate students' tasks

Systems integration is the origin of most major difficulties found in the engineering design of aeronautical vehicles. The whole design team must assure that each subsystem accomplishes its particular goals and that, together with the rest of the systems, they all meet the general aircraft requirements. Design and building of UAS is a field of actuation to which leading Universities, research Centers and Aeronautical designers have dedicated a lot of effort. In recent years, a team of students, lecturers and professors at the Escuela Universitaria de Ingeniería Técnica Aeronáutica (EUITA) have been working on the design and building of a UAS for civil observation. The design of multi-mission Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has seen a rapid progress in the last years. A wide variety of designs and applications, some of them really ingenious, have been proposed. The project, which has been going on as a teamwork experience for the last ten years, consists of the design and building of a UAV, and its peculiarity is that it has been carried out entirely by undergraduate students, as part of their Final Research Project. The students face a challenge that includes all the features and stages of an authentic engineering project. We present the current moment of evolution in the process, together with a description of the main difficulties the project has undergone, as a global experience in engineering design and development.

[1]  Christopher Kitts,et al.  Development and Teleoperation of Robotic Vehicles , 2003 .

[2]  D. L. Dekker,et al.  Utilizing rapid prototyping to enhance undergraduate engineering education , 2000, 30th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Building on A Century of Progress in Engineering Education. Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.00CH37135).

[3]  Paul F. Jacobs,et al.  Rapid Prototyping & Manufacturing: Fundamentals of Stereolithography , 1992 .

[4]  Charles L. Thomas,et al.  Rapid prototyping of large scale aerospace structures , 1996, 1996 IEEE Aerospace Applications Conference. Proceedings.

[5]  Kimon P. Valavanis,et al.  Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: State of the Art and the Road to Autonomy , 2007 .

[6]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  A flight control system for aerial robots: algorithms and experiments , 2002 .

[7]  C Cuerno-Rejado,et al.  Conceptual design of a medium-sized joined-wing aircraft , 2010 .

[8]  Anbal Ollero,et al.  Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles , 2008 .

[9]  Rodrigo Martinez-Val,et al.  Preliminary design of a low speed, long endurance remote piloted vehicles (RPV) for civil applications , 1999 .

[10]  E. Torenbeek,et al.  Synthesis of Subsonic Airplane Design , 1979 .

[11]  Michael W. Usrey,et al.  A case for engineering edutainment in the 21st century , 2000, 30th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Building on A Century of Progress in Engineering Education. Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.00CH37135).

[12]  Reg Austin,et al.  Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Uavs Design, Development and Deployment , 2010 .

[13]  Andrew L. Heyes,et al.  Rapid Technique for Wind-Tunnel Model Manufacture , 2004 .

[14]  G. Anitha,et al.  Vision Based Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle , 2012 .

[15]  Randal W. Beard,et al.  Target Acquisition, Localization, and Surveillance Using a Fixed-Wing Mini-UAV and Gimbaled Camera , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[16]  Daniel P. Raymer,et al.  Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach , 1989 .

[17]  Benjamin J. Chartier.  Project-Based Learning : A Search and Rescue UAV – Perceptions of an Undergraduate Engineering Design Team : A Preliminary Study , 2007 .

[18]  A. M. Springer.  Application of Rapid Prototyping Methods to High-Speed Wind Tunnel Testing , 1998 .

[19]  Robert Beard,et al.  Evaluation of stereolithography rapid prototyping for low speed airfoil design , 1997 .

[20]  Ching-Fang Lin,et al.  Modern Navigation, Guidance, And Control Processing , 1991 .

[21]  Leland M. Nicolai.  Fundamentals of Aircraft Design , 1984 .

[22]  Pedro J. Boschetti,et al.  Design of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Ecological Conservation , 2005 .

[23]  E. Seymour,et al.  Establishing the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates in the sciences: First findings from a three‐year study , 2004 .

[24]  Kimon P. Valavanis,et al.  Unmanned Aircraft Systems , 2009 .

[25]  Peter G. Ifju,et al.  Vision-guided flight stability and control for micro air vehicles , 2003, Adv. Robotics.

[26]  Anne Marchant,et al.  An undergraduate experimental UAV payload project to teach problem solving and project lifecycle skills , 2007, SITE.

[27]  Warren Stiver.  Sustainable Design in a Second Year Engineering Design Course , 2010 .

[28]  Jan Roskam.  Preliminary sizing of airplanes , 1989 .

[29]  Christopher Kitts,et al.  An interdisciplinary field robotics program for undergraduate computer science and engineering education , 2004, JERC.

[30]  J. LaBerteaux,et al.  Advanced Picosatellite Experiment , 2009, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.

[31]  D. F. Kostishack,et al.  Micro Air Vehicles for Optical Surveillance , 1999 .

[32]  B. Bloom,et al.  Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain , 1966 .