Want a Flying Drone? These Students 3D-Printed Their Own
- 6:30 am |
That YouTube video caught the eye of the MITRE team as they researched the viability of a 3D-printed aerial platform. Balazs and Rotner realized they might have found the right person to lead the build of their aircraft.
“The government doesn’t really have interest in small model turbine engines, but they might have an interest in being able to print a robotic platform,” Balazs says. “So we met with professor Sheffler and said, ‘Hey, would you be interested and do you think we could do this?'”
He said yes to both questions.
Sheffler e-mailed a cryptic note to the engineering students: he was looking for two summer interns for a 3D-printing project. He received only one response, from Easter, who brought his lab partner and brother Turman along for the meeting. The duo was surprised to see six executives in suits as they walked into the room.
The brothers began working on the project in May, spending upwards to 80 hours per week in the lab creating and refining their design. One of the first and biggest obstacles they encountered was the heavier weight and greater deflection of printed plastic over the balsa wood typically used to build the plane they modeled their design on. This meant that, rather than just printing the same pieces in a kit, they’d have to completely re-engineer the frame’s design.
Fortunately, they could print the plastic to take any shape they could design on their CAD system, allowing them to create designs that would be impossible to make solely out of wood. That also allowed them to make on-the-spot modifications; at one point, as the printer laid down layer after layer of plastic, the MITRE scientists called the brothers with a big design change. The plane needed ailerons to work correctly with the autopilot being used. Hardly skipping a beat, the brothers modified the files to incorporate that element, and let the printer add it to the existing printouts.
They also took advantage of the printed aspect to design and incorporate rapidly deployable, Lego-like connectors for each of the plane’s components. Different types of connections were devised, printed, and tested as the pieces started to take shape.
Finally, in August, they set up for the maiden flight — which proved disastrous. But their subsequent attempts were hugely successful. The printed platform and its Android brain both handled everything asked of them.
“Our pilot informed us it was very easy to fly and didn’t need a lot of hand-holding,” Easter says. “It had a lot of lift naturally and could glide a long ways. The first landing was a slightly rough, as the pilot was adjusting to the flight characteristics, but the second landing — we flew twice that day just to be sure — was very graceful.”
So how will this type of system be used? “You’d love to be able to set up four or five of these things to fly above a forest fire,” Balazs says. “You’d use the camera right there on the phone to snap pictures. They’re all geolocated using the GPS on the phone. You’d put a temperature sensor on there … Where you find the hottest part of the fire and the strongest wind, that’s the area where you need to fight the fire.”