Hey everyone,

I just wanted to give a little background on our team, CUAir, Cornell’s Autonomous Aerial Vehicle team. We compete in the AUVSI SUAS competition (more information here). We’re a group of 50 interdisciplinary students working on everything from the plane’s hardware to the electronics system to the software the tags the images from the airplane.

The plane:

Our plane is built from the mixture of fiberglass-foam-fiberglass and kevlar skin to protect the plane from hard landings. The interior frame that holds the payloads is made from lasercut wood, allowing for simple removal of all components from the batteries to the computer. The plane is designed to be more of a glider, so we have a folding propellor and efficient airframe which allows for 45 minutes of flight time for a loaded flight weight of 8kg.

The goal of this plane is to perform autonomous takeoffs and landings. Therefore, we designed a portable pneumatic catapult that launches the plane and built a kevlar underbelly to take bumpy belly landings.

The electronics:

The plane flies using the Pixhawk autopilot running ArduPlane. In addition to the autopilot the plane carries a custom brushless gimbal and camera, Portwell Intel Atom computer, 3x long range Wifi links, Xbee radio, custom smart power distribution board.

We’ve mostly been working on upgrading the SITL to work with XPlane and MavProxy in addition to designing a custom ground station that runs on top of MavProxy. The code for all of our changes will be available as soon as we clean it up and iron out the large bugs; we’re hoping that you guys will find it useful.

We’ll be posting in the coming weeks about our composite techniques, painting techniques, test flights and anything you guys are interested in learning about our team. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below, and if you’re ever visiting Cornell, stop by the lab or come to a test flight!

In the meantime...enjoy the pictures below:

Testing with the Bixler (in the rain)

Our 9s flight batteries, 3s electronics batteries and mini Pb catapult battery

Our test plane on the CG balancer

Our entire test flight setup (catapult in background)

The test plane ready to launch