By RACHEL ATKINSON
A BYU team of mechanical engineers did something that has never been done before by students in the Micro Air Vehicles competition — they developed a plane that would not only find its target once, but would do it again and again, all on its own.
These and other engineers from BYU showcased their planes at the MAV competition, which took place at the University of Arizona Saturday.
“We had been telling people all year what we were planning and engineering, but at the competition we finally got to show other people what we have been doing, and they could see that we did it,” said Jon Ostler, a mechanical engineer who participated in the surveillance portion of the competition.
He said the surveillance team, which took third place in their category, had been working together from the beginning of the year to create an airplane that would be practical.
“We spent our year making a different kind of aircraft,” Ostler said. “The competition is great, and it drives innovation and research, but the planes that come out of it aren’t useful.”
Teammate Jaremy Flake said in the surveillance part of the competition, students must create a plane that will fly towards a target 600 meters away. The planes are judged by their ability to attain a clear visual image of the target.
“Usually what happens is they find the target, and they basically dive-bomb their airplanes into the target, trying to get a good picture of it,” Flake said. “No one, in this competition, has ever recovered their airplane after viewing the target.”
Flake said their goal was to create an airplane that, although bigger than many planes in the competition, would be easier to fly and would return home, rather than simply crashing after seeing its target.
“The competition was our second priority,” he said. “We didn’t design an airplane to compete well in this competition. We designed an airplane that was more practical, that was based on the customer’s potential needs.”
He said his team implemented MAGICC pilot, an integrated system of mini sensors and a microprocessor that make the plane completely autonomous. MAGICC pilot enabled the plane to adjust itself for stability in windy weather conditions and to follow waypoints designated by the team, to reach a particular destination.
He said an autonomous plane knows where it needs to go and can keep itself balanced, but to operate a plane a pilot must be very skilled, especially when it is more than 600 meters away. By creating a plane that is controlled by the computer, the user does not have to spend as much time on training.
Flake said many companies were impressed when their plane flew autonomously and acquired the target eight times, something that had never been done before in the MAV competition.
“BYU’s name and reputation is being spread to companies because they are making notes of what BYU is doing and developing, and they are quite interested,” he said.
Ostler said after facing many challenges in the design and development of the plane, to see the plane fly as they had intended probably felt the same way a sports team does when it wins a championship.
“We wanted an airplane that would be like BYU’s flagship aircraft, to show off the work we are doing with airplanes and the research the MAGICC lab is doing,” Ostler said. “And we were able to do that.”
Jerry Bowman, a professor of mechanical engineering, said at the beginning of the year, the students who applied to be on the capstone airplane teams were split up into smaller teams. Each team developed a plane for a different aspect of the competition.
BYU placed third overall and first in the design and report portion of the competition. The BYU junior MAV team that competed in the endurance portion of the competition took fifth place.
“I was really proud of them, they did some incredible things,” Bowman said. “They worked hard and their hard work paid off.”
