Hey everyone! The Triton UAS team has been busy this fall building a new plane, hosting workshops, and welcoming new members! Details 👇
✈️ Our airframe team, led by Thomas Dolby, Brandon Vinh, and David Nielsen, has been building a new airplane from scratch and teaching new members along the way. The onboarding aircraft project gives new members hands-on experience with composite manufacturing, principles of aerospace design, and teamwork.
After two years of competition cancellations due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Triton UAS attended the 2022 AUVSI Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition, hosted by the Seafarer Chapter of the AUVSI. We are proud to announce that we placed 5th out of 71 teams! Additionally, we placed 4th in flight mission score. On top of this, we had the highest ranking fixed wing plane and represented the highest ranked American university at the competition. In addition, we placed 16th for Technical Design Paper which was submitted as a detailed report of our overall system design and 22nd for Flight Readiness Review which is a video outlining our testing results and our level of preparedness for competition.
In light of the upcoming competition, Triton UAS completed and submitted the technical design paper by the February 15th, 2021 deadline and is available for viewing below.
Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the precautionary measures set by UC San Diego in response to Covid, Triton UAS switched all project work to a primarily online platform. In the virtual setting, we made significant progress on the design and analysis of our Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and new flight platform, Carbon Copy. Towards the end of the year, with lighter Covid restrictions and participating members receiving vaccinations, we held in-person work along with virtual work. In these meetings, we outfitted both the Swallow and the Ranger, a new autonomous flight platform, for two separate test flights.