Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team

Starting January 1st, 2008, the University of Missouri-Rolla will be officially known as the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), more about that here. As a result of this we will also be changing our name to MS&T AESS UAV Team.

Since our crash several months ago we have been developing a new wing specifically designed to meet our requirements for our mission. Since speed is high priority in our mission we have designed a wing that is smaller and more aerodynamic allowing us to fly faster in order to cover the search area in less time. Two of our excellent Aerospace Engineers have been working on the design of our wing, performing various calculations and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis. Unfortunately due to everybody’s busy schedules we have been slightly behind schedule in the construction of the new wing, but we plan to be back in the air by late January or early February. Below are a few images of our current design and a screenshot of our UAV flying in the X-Plane flight simulator.

We are also currently in the process of evaluating our strategy for acquiring and processing the images, we are working to decide what approach would be best suited and the most efficient for our mission. Our second revision of the power distribution board for the UAV is also nearing completion (see below).