Project Aborted

    Scout

   

    The scout plane is our reconnaissance UAV for the IARC 2008 competition. It is our clubs first fiberglass UAV. This allows it to be much stronger than any other plane we've ever had, but still light weight and small. This will allow it to better handle the rough life our UAVs are put through without needing as many repairs. The construction process used on this plane is the same as industries use when making full scale planes.

Purpose:
    The purpose of the scout plane is to fly Level 1 in two minutes or less and then begin flybys of the town. It will transmit the video of its flybys to our vision computer for further analysis in its attempt to find the IARC symbol somewhere in the town.
It is also our first fully electric UAV in many many years. This reason for this switch is two fold. Simplicity and safety. Our plane uses one battery to power the motors, camera and autopilot. So we have multipleidentical battery packs that we can swap to keep the plane in the air as much as possible. While the plane is flying the other battery packs are being charged. Also the propellers are plastic and a much smaller diameter than their internal combustion counterpoints propellers and thus much safer to be working around and use. One more plus is that the scout plane is a zeroemissions vehicle.

Autopilot:
    The scout plane uses the piccolo plus autopilot system from Cloud Cap Technologies for autonomous flight. We control the flight of the scout plane through our ground station and piccolo software. It uses a GPS as well as air data collected by the piccolo plus on-board sensors for position data. It communicates to the ground station through a 900Mhz spread spectrum antenna.




Vision:
    The scout plane has a forward looking Hi-res camera mounted on its nose. It uses the Blackwidow KPC650 High Resolution Color 12v CCD camera and transmits the video with a Blackwidow 2.4ghz 1000mW transmitter. The camera is statically mounted at the current moment, but plans have been made to switch to a pan-tilt camera system

Electronics:
Battery: 4 cell Li-Po 2 x 4400mAh = 8800mAh
Piccolo Plus autopilot
Blackwidow KPC650 High Resolution Color 12v CCD
2.4ghz 1000mw Transmitter

Motors: Great Planes Rimfire 35-36-1500 Out-Runner Brushless
Wing Span: 56 inches
Weight: 8 lbs
Estimated Flight Time: 15-20 minutes