CyDrone

May 2009-May 2013

CyDrone was a college project I was involved in that was to prove the feasibility of designing, manufacturing, and deploying a highly modular, semi-autonomous small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle which individuals or small local entities can easily afford and operate to perform a wide envelope of civil missions.

CyDrone CAD rendering
Rendering of the X-3 Airframe

It primarily used Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components to create an affordable and modular system to complete a variety of missions. The airframe was custom designed from a low-cost foam with an internal structure to support our flight envelope. We used analytics tools like XFLR5 for determining the right airfoil for our flight profile and ANSYS for the structural members of the airframe.

3D Representation of some of our Aerodynamic Analysis

Knowing this would be a project that would need to be worked past our time at Iowa State University, the team developed rigorous flight test and material plans and reports so that data could be recorded and shared to the teams as the project moved forward.