Phase 1 - Team Updates!

10/03/2021

We're making steady progress on refining our schematics, options, and initial presentations to make sure that we do this project by the book. We've been meeting every week out in the Library makerspace to make sure we have everything ready before we start!

Updated Problem Statement

Law enforcement officers are first-responders and have many duties and responsibilities to the people they protect and serve. The nature of their work often means that they are put in dangerous situations and have to make quick decisions based on limited information. If a robot can be used to gather crucial information about a situation and environment, the risk of injury to an officer can be greatly reduced. An indoor search and rescue drone will be able to gather initial information about unknown, potentially dangerous environments and occupants without directly putting an officer in danger. Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are well equipped to handle obstacles and multi-level buildings, but can also become expensive and are not always rugged enough for enclosed spaces. Their battery life may not meet expectations for a full building sweep or investigation and they can be difficult to deploy and control according to the team's interviews with police officers. These police departments in the South Texas area have expressed to us that the current tactical drones that they have access to are large and have limited capability of operating and maneuvering indoors. These drones are over 2 feet in length, have dangerous propellers, and some drones can be fragile when operating indoors. This limits the capabilities of search/rescue and recon. Because of this, police currently lack sufficient options to use drones for purposes of indoor search and rescue or room clearing operations. To solve this problem, Project Alpha is a less than 1 square foot, rugged, less than 1lb short-range unmanned aerial vehicle that can easily be maneuvered indoors and can assist police with room clearing and search and rescue operations. This is helpful because it would allow officers to utilize a more effective drone and have visuals of a scene before putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations.

The requirements detailed to us by the officers are that the drone must have a frame that is able to withstand bumps, collisions and other impacts. To solve these requirements, we plan to make our drone frame out of a lightweight, durable material. We also plan to use an integrated propeller guard so that the propeller cannot accidentally hurt others. They have also requested that the drone be light enough to carry and small enough so that it is not cumbersome and will allow it to maneuver its environments more effectively than larger drones. At the end of our senior design 2, we will work with a police department in the south texas area for training and operational testing.

The design team's goal is to design, fabricate, and test a UAV drone that will weigh less than 1 pound, fit within 1 square foot, survive a 30 mph crash, withstand an energy impact of an IK09 rating (10 Joules from any 2D direction), hold up to a water resistance rating of IPX4 (splashes of water from any direction), have a flight time of 30 minutes, and have an easily repairable layout.


Technical Challenges

  • We will need to evaluate different potential body shapes for the drone and conduct calculations to determine which is the best. We plan to do a technical analysis of different potential drone shapes so that we can narrow down which shape will be chosen moving forward

  • Choosing materials and fabrication methods is another difficulty, the team is researching different potential materials for the frame and will discuss the pros and cons at the next meeting

  • Our team needs to decide on how many individual modules to make for our frame design. More parts will mean that if a specific piece breaks, it can be easily swapped out without replacing the entire frame. The more parts we have, however, the less durable the frame will be. Our team will need to account for different numbers of modules when performing our analysis in order to decide what the optimal balance between durability and repairability is.

CEO's Notes

We're really starting to make good progress on the project. I think our morale is high, our team is focused, and we're all contributing in our own way to making sure we succeed. It's looking like we'll be able to make good progress on this project, and I'm very happy with the progress we're making. The song 'I'm on my Way' from the movie Brother Bear has been on loop as our team has met over the last 4 weeks. We're on the way to a full, working robot that helps keep people out of harm's way. And one day, we hope to be a company that'll change the way we see not just security, defense, and safety, but the way we see the world.

-- Bernard Li, CEO


Limited Technologies, Inc. 
Powered by Webnode
Create your website for free! This website was made with Webnode. Create your own for free today! Get started