Mechanical undergrad leads team designing drone for first responders

Interdisciplinary Capstone Team 24050 won the Frank L. Broyles Award for Best UAS Design at this year’s Craig M. Berge Design Day. The team of undergraduate engineers worked with sponsor Raytheon Technologies to create a drone that was economical, reliable, deploys to its working altitude quickly and quietly, and that could be made with readily available components.

The drone is designed for use by first responders, search and rescue, or law enforcement workers. Under certain circumstances it may not be retrievable, so the design had to be low-cost.

The team’s drone looks more like a model rocket than a typical quad copter, and that’s because it is launched from a pneumatic tube. Once it reaches the desired altitude – up to around 300 feet – the drone pilot remotely jettisons the rear assembly on the craft to deploy four propellers on forearms, which snap out of the fuselage of the drone by means of an elastic shock cord. The pneumatic launcher gets the drone aloft in a hurry and also saves precious battery power.

“Disposable is a relative term, of course,” said team lead Nathan Randall Julicher, who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree. “For a government agency or police force, that might mean a few hundred dollars.”

Julicher is an avid aviator. He has a private pilot’s license and acquired a Part 107 drone pilot’s license specifically for the capstone project. While that didn’t turn out to be necessary for the project, Julicher said, he wanted to be extra careful.

Award sponsor Frank Broyles was impressed.

“For a student engineer to hold a Part 107 license, I loved it from the get-go,” he said. “It's the first time I've ever run into that.”