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.
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.
Triton UAS is off to a fresh start this year with new members and new leadership. The airframe subteam has worked on and made progress on the unmanned ground vehicle, and rebuilding the main airframe, Fiber One. The embedded team has been hard at work on the antenna tracker as well as the signal and power sister boards. The airframe and embedded team have worked jointly on outfitting and wiring the backup airframe, Swallow, for a maiden flight in the beginning of Winter quarter. The software team worked on generating artificial targets, a user interface for the path planner, and interfacing with the judging server.