The Marius

The beginning of a journey

The Fall of the 2023-2024 academic year proved to be an exciting quarter for new and returning members alike. This quarter was the first quarter that introduced a brand new batch of onboarding projects to teach new members the basic skills used throughout the year in TritonUAS, which were all brought together at the end of the quarter to create the onboarding plane called The Marius.

The airframe new member team specifically was in charge of manufacturing the aircraft over a period of 8 weeks, while the leads created the design over the summer. This plane would be used for software testing in order to increase the amount of data the software teeam can acquire for their computer vision and path planning algorithms as the competition aircraft is being constructed. In other words, they would not need to wait for the airframe and embedded teams to complete the competition aircraft to test their software. The Marius was much smaller than Toothless and Duckasaurus, with only an 8 foot wingspan, designed to be able to hold the camera as its main payload. It was made out of layuped fiberglass, using both CNC cut out foam molds for the wings and tail and a new 3D printed mold for the fuselage. Besides just manufacturing procedures, new members were also taught the reasoning behind specific design choices, adding to their knowledge of aerodynamics, aerospace structures, and design problem solving through creativity.

Throughout the Fall quarter, new members were taught skills in manufacturing and design. This included wet-composite layups, epoxy mixture and bonding with microballoons, manufacturing procedures, aircraft design rationale, laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC hot-wire cutting, and much more. With this knowledge, new members are able to contribute more directly to the design and manufacturing of the competition aircraft.

Fun fact: The Marius was named after IKEA stools that were purchased at the beginning of the year as construction of the onboarding plane began. It represents a new beginning for the club, as the chairs were a new beginning for the club as old chairs were thrown out and new chairs were brought in.