Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team

Sorry about the lack of updates, there are many new updates coming shortly so bear with us.  The first update being that we completed the new wing and completed the first flight with the new wing and it performed very well even in windy conditions.  Unfortunately there are no pictures of the actual flight but here are some pictures of the new wing on the airplane.  This new wing is significantly stronger allowing us to carry our large payload, it also has less drag allowing us to fly at greater speeds.

Although you can’t see from this picture the entire trailing edge consists of the control surfaces for the flaps and the ailerons, we plan on using the flaps during landing to allow us to land slower at slower speeds.

We have also been working on the onboard computer for the airplane, below are some pictures of it and the new enclosure that we had rapid prototyped out of polycarbonate on campus.  The onboard computer is a single-board-computer (SBC) with a 1.8GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of flash running Ubuntu Linux.  This computer will handle all of the image acquisition and some or all of the image processing.

Since we have the UAV in flying condition again we will be slowly integrating the all of the electronics into the actual airframe and there should be more frequent updates now that we will be back in the testing/development phase.

We began construction of the new wing on Friday (January 25th) after all the ribs were waterjet. The new wing is build out of plywood and balsa and hardwood rib caps. So far it seems to be significantly stronger than our previous wing. Building a wing from scratch can be a rather tedious and time consuming process, in the last two days we have put in 20+ hours building the wing, and it’s now nearing completion. The control surfaces are the last major component left to build. Below are some pictures of the wing (for more pictures visit our flickr).

The left wing panel.

The complete three panel wing.

By having a three panel wing, transportation is greatly simplified.