UAV updateStudent aero-design competition to be held next week
The Aero Design competition, to be held at the end of the month, is intended to provide undergraduate and graduate engineering students with a real-life engineering challenge; the organizers say the competition has been designed to provide exposure to the kinds of situations that engineers face in their real-life work environment; students will find themselves performing trade studies and making compromises to arrive at a design solution that will optimally meet the mission requirements while still conforming to the configuration limitations
A team of Indian students from the RV College of Engineering in Bangalore is traveling to the United States to participate in the SAE Aero-design Challenge East-2011, which will be held in Georgia, from 29 April to 1 May (see the event’s rules and regulations here).
The team – calling itself Team Yoma – will enter their UAV in the micro class category. The Deccan Chronicle reports that their drone weighs about one kilograms, runs on an electric motor, and can stay aloft for about five minutes. It rises to about 100 feet and carries a radio transmitter with a range of two kilometers.
“The micro UAV that will be flown in the event has been under construction for more than a year now and can carry three times its own weight. So we are extremely confident about clearing the inspection by Boeing and Lockheed Martin and also securing a position among the top five,” Kiran Doddigarla, one of the team members, told the Chronicle.
The team’s faculty adviser, R. S. Kulkarni, notes that the college has been working on different UAV designs for the last three years.
