AeroTEC

UAV Health Monitoring and Flight Test Development Phase III

In the past, the AeroTEC capstone projects have focused on supersonic and highly efficient structural aircraft designs. This student team will work to capitalize on past work developed as part of the Aircraft Design Capstone programs, specifically in Phase I and Phase II, developing flying UAV for use as flight test beds for advanced R&D. AeroTEC will use the Phase II aircraft for additional research and development in the areas of modeling, simulation, data acquisition, telemetry systems and machine learning. The '24/25 AeroTEC student team will work to develop a program and capabilities that will allow future students to test designs in a controlled environment using industry standard best practices. For phase III this student team will work to further develop the aircraft health monitoring system and machine learning techniques for data analysis as well as learn telemetry and flight test best practices. This student team will work to focus on the phase II aircraft and health monitoring system. The student team will be responsible for prepping the flight test aircraft and conducting a Safety of Flight Review. Students will be responsible for providing research and data to support AeroTEC getting flight permits for FAA flight clearance at AeroTEC's Moses Lake facility for fight testing. The student team will work to further develop simulation models in key areas of S&C, FEM and performance for prediction of key flight characteristics and structural dynamics from Phase II's takeoff point. This student team will also work to provide specification of key instrumentation to allow for comparison of flight test data to simulator data. Additionally, this student team will work to develop a low cost aircraft health monitoring system (with support from AeroTEC) that can be installed on the aircraft and record structural health data. This will flow from Phase II's work. The outcomes this student team will work to achieve are: - Further development of one of the flight test articles that can be used for flight test development programs (Phase II Truss Braced Wing). - Flight of a UAV under remote and autonomous control and BLOS flight. - Execution of a SOF review before flight release, - Further development flight simulator and the structural health monitoring system. - Further development Telemetry system and Beyond Line of Sight testing.