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The Corporate Affiliates Program (CAP) held a board meeting on the evening of February 13th, where executives from partner companies as well as UCSD faculty members can receive updates on the Jacobs School of Engineering and progress of student organizations. Not only does this serve as an opportunity for student organizations to showcase their projects, but additionally students are able to network directly with members from industry.

As one of the student project teams in attendance, Triton UAS had on display our full plane, 2-axis camera gimbal, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), software demo of our saliency program for detecting targets using a RCNN object detection algorithm and You Only Look Once (YOLO), informational brochures, and a brand-new poster printed by CAP. Our team was able to talk to C-level executives about our project, including representatives from Qimia, Bentley, Brain Corp., Solar Turbines, General Atomics, Lytx, as well as UCSD faculty members.

On February 8th, UCSD SWE held the Envision 2020 Conference to introduce high school girls to STEM related career paths. Triton UAS participated in the Project Fair of the conference, where high school girls got the opportunity to get familiar with the engineering, science, and technology student organizations of UCSD.

Triton UAS and other student organizations spent an hour tabling and introducing themselves to the students and answering any inquiries they had. The students asked questions about the plane construction process and how to join Triton UAS. Many also expressed their interest in joining our organization if they were to attend UCSD after graduating from high school.

On February 16th, 2020, Triton UAS conducted a maiden flight for the Swallow. There were ideal flight conditions with a clear day, little wind, and no rain.

The location of the Swallow’s first flight was held at Black Mountain, a local San Diego field about twenty minutes away from campus. The Swallow successfully flew at Black Mountain and we used this opportunity to also calibrate the pitot tube of the aircraft. Despite the ideal flying conditions in the sky, ground conditions for take-off and landing were unsafe. Initial take-off raised questions on whether the Swallow would be able to take off before crashing into the bushes located at the end of the runway. Landing also had its share of complications, with the Swallow needing to circle around several times in the air before successfully landing because the runway area was unpaved grass and too short for landing gear that had no braking capabilities. The flight lasted for around 20 minutes, with an initial throttle of 80% that was lowered to 60% by the end. Despite the ideal flight conditions, our safety pilot, Brad Sexton, decided to move the flight’s location because of the unsafe landing and takeoff conditions.

On December 18th, 2019, two of our Triton UAS airframe team leads, Jessica Chan and Andrew Fletcher, got the opportunity to stay after the UCSD final exam season to attend High Tech High Chula Vista’s (HTHCV) Presentations of Learning to serve as expert panelists. They were able to attend thanks to the invitation of Marcus Artates, a 9th-grade Physics teacher at the HTHCV charter school who was previously introduced to Jessica and Triton UAS last year at a tabling event during the San Diego Maker Faire. At the Presentations of Learning, Jessica and Andrew were able to listen in during the students’ presentations and provided expert input to help improve each group’s prototype autonomous planes.