Design Build Fly

Background

Design Build Fly is an annual RC airplane student competition held by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The goal of each year is to design and build an airplane to complete three flight missions and one ground mission, while trying to maximize the score. The MAE 151 team is tasked to design a glider that is to autonomously fly, do a 180-degree turn, and land in a designated 200x200 foot target area. This glider is part of 2 of the 3 flight missions as well as the ground mission.

Design Overview

Our glider features a rectangular wing with an H-tail in order to wrap around the body of the fuselage of the bigger DBF airplane. This design will allow our glider to mount to the fuselage of the main plane better as well as reducing the overall drag of the main plane. We will be using a Speedybee F405 Wing flight controller in order to be able to complete the autonomous flight components of the mission. To keep our glider as light as possible, we plan on using a 3.7 Volt 500 mAh battery with a step up converter to power the 3 servos and Speedybee F405 flight controller.

Goals and Objectives

Our Goal for this project is to land the glider successfully, fulfilling all AIAA requirements, along with making a design that allows our glider to minimize the overall drag of the main airplane and glider. We hope to place in the top 10 in the AIAA competition, improving UCI’s overall score of 23rd from last year. 

Preliminary concept and prototype: Completed December 11th 

1st Flight Test: Completed January 14th

1st retest after glider iteration: Completed February 14th

Finalize design after second iteration: March 7th

AIAA competition dates: April 9th-13th 

INAV Autonomous Software:

To achieve autonomous flight, we use a software called INAV. After flashing this software to our Speedybee F405, we make our glider within the software, telling INAV which servos control our ailerons, and how our ailerons are positioned. After setting this up, we use INAV waypoint navigation, a program that allows the user to program the flight controller to navigate to a set GPS point on command. This allows us to set our glider up to be deployed from the main DBF and navigate to the pre disclosed location without any outside communication with the glider. 

Contact Information:

Team Members:

Hunter Walsh: walshh@uci.edu 

Peter Tran: peternt1@uci.edu

Kyle Chen: kechen2@uci.edu

Aaron Yang: pojeny1@uci.edu 

Nova Mcnaught: mcnaughe@uci.edu  

Sponsor/Advisor: 

Dr. Jacqueline Huynh: huynhlj@uci.edu 

Seraphin Yeung: nhyeung@uci.edu