Our team
Team Directors
Mechanical Team
The mechanical team is responsible for designing and fabricating airframes, test rigs, and additional hardware such as ground stations, gimbals, cases, and competition-specific equipment. We use SolidWorks, an industry-standard tool for 3D computer-aided design. Our hands-on work involves 3D printing, laser-cutting, water-jetting, CNC machining, milling, sheet metal, and composites work. Joining the mechanical team will give you hands-on experience in prototyping airframes.
Electrical Team
The electrical team is responsible for drone harnessing, custom carrier boards, the RF suite, and ensuring that all electrical components on the drone are ready for flight. You can gain experience designing and validating industry-relevant projects such as custom sensor carrier boards, STM32 breakout boards, Nucleo shields, RF design and analysis, RF testing, power delivery harnesses, and power monitors. As part of the electrical team, you'll blend theory and design while gaining hands-on experience by assembling and validating your work!
Operations Team
The operations team is responsible for managing the team's finances, sponsors, competition logistics, socials, recruiting, and branding. Our team manages a diverse portfolio to ensure the technical teams have sufficient resources to meet their project deliverables. We are also responsible for managing internal and external communications to facilitate the transfer of information between project groups and sponsors. Joining the operations team gives you an overarching idea of the logistics behind running a design team.
Embedded Flight Software Team
The Embedded Flight Software team is responsible for all avionics-related software and firmware and is the "glue" that brings all teams together. As part of the firmware team, students learn about driver and sensor development, bring-up, validation, and standard communication protocols such as I2C, SPI, and UART. Firmware team members also learn about using tools such as oscilloscopes, soldering irons, function generators, and power supplies. As part of the firmware team, students learn to solve problems about attitude management, path planning, communication, multi-threading and concurrency, resource management and interfacing with our firmware OS layer.
Autonomy Team
The Autonomy sub-team is responsible for implementing the software to have our drone perform autonomous tasks. Our software processes information from sensors to collect information on detected targets and decides the drone's action given the situation. We develop and train object detection and classification models to identify particular ground targets using our onboard camera. Our team also works on writing code to chart the drone's flight path and our custom ground control station. By joining our team, you can learn to write code that tells the drone what to look for and where to go.