UAV Forge

Background

UAV Forge is a multidisciplinary engineering senior design project with a focus on designing, building and programming unmanned aerial vehicles in order to complete the flight missions under a time limit. Through research and hands-on experience, students are able to work towards creating an autonomous aircraft. This project, UAV Forge, aims to allow students to gain technical skills and learn more about the engineering process. Through inspiring innovation and teamwork between the different students in MAE, EECS, CPE, CSE and CS majors, students are able to come out of the project with a broader knowledge of the different engineering fields.

Goal and Objectives

Starting with a kit aircraft, UAV Forge must assemble and modify said kit in order to manufacture our own UAV and develop a competitive design that could both win competitions and be applicable to challenges in the industry, such as companies involved in UAV research like Amazon’s package-delivering.

Our project goal is to be able to assemble and efficiently modify an airplane model kit to house all the electronic hardware necessary. This involves being able to have a fully automated takeoff and landing program, demonstrate flight autonomy, an ability to transmit UAV telemetry, hold an image capturing system, and finally being able to perform an airdrop of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), carrying in a standard 8 oz water bottle. Our airplane will be used to test all radio communications, autonomous flight functions and image capturing systems before everything can be mounted on the airplane.

Conclusions

Our team has worked hard this past academic year to modify a kit Avistar aircraft to be fully autonomous and to design and build an autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. We are continuing our work over the summer and hope to keep innovating UAVs with a new team next academic year. We are all excited to apply the technical and administrative knowledge gained in order to strive to be better engineers and reach for excellence.

Team Website

https://sites.uci.edu/uavforge/

Contacts

Faculty Advisor(s):

MAE Advisor: Natascha Buswell – nbuswell@uci.edu

EECS Advisor: Quoc-Viet Dang – qpdang@uci.edu

ICS Advisor: Ian G. Harris – harris@ics.uci.edu

Student Contact(s) (2018-2019):

Project Manager: Raashi Kashyap – kashyapr@uci.edu

Chief Engineer of MAE: Kyle Krumrei – kkrumrei@uci.edu

Chief Engineer of EECS: Che-Wei Chang – chewec2@uci.edu