As stated earlier in our Winter 2020 Recap and Spring Goals blog post, our goal was to finish and publish our technical design paper by the original competition deadline, May 15th, to prepare for next year’s competition, show potential and current members, future and current sponsors, as well as UCSD engineering departments what we have accomplished this year despite these limiting circumstances. The complete paper is below:
Triton UAS’ Winter Quarter was filled with significant milestones for both our project and outreach efforts, such as the maiden flight and tuning of our main flight platform, the Swallow, and various outreach events throughout the quarter.
Triton UAS was involved in several outreach opportunities with the local and UC San Diego community. The quarter started with new member recruitment at the Winter Engineers on the Green. This was the first opportunity of the quarter to recruit fellow students to our project. Triton UAS continued outreach efforts with a presentation to the students at High Tech High Chula Vista about our organization and project. Leads Andrew Fletcher and José Orozco explained how we develop our year-long project and answered questions about us, our project, and UC San Diego. We also participated in the SWE Envision Project Fair, where we tabled alongside other UC San Diego project organizations and introduced our project to visiting high school girls from the San Diego area.
In the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic, the UC San Diego has temporarily suspended non-essential gatherings on campus. As such, the Triton Day event for newly admitted Tritons has moved to a completely virtual platform. To accommodate these changes and continue reaching out to new students, Triton UAS has produced a short video to introduce new students to our project for the Structural Engineering Department’s Virtual Triton Day YouTube playlist. The 5 minutes video we produced is embedded above.
On February 7th, airframe lead, Andrew Fletcher, and embedded lead, José Orozco, visited High Tech High Chula Vista to give a short presentation to Marcus Artates’ 9th grade physics class about Triton UAS and our three subteams. Triton UAS has previously worked with Marcus Artates and HTHCV when Andrew and our other airframe lead, Jessica Chan, served as panelists at the Presentations of Learning, with their experiences published in our other blog post. The students in Marcus’ class have been working on several different projects with one of the projects being an aerospace project similar to what Triton UAS works on. With this visit, we hoped to give the students a more detailed explanation about our student organization and answer any questions they had for us.