Purdue Aerial Robotics Team, or PART for short, is a large club at Purdue that competes in the RoboNation SUAS competition to develop an autonomous aerial system that has to identify targets and deploy associated payloads over a large course. There’s a lot that goes into it. Check it out . My role for the 2023 - 2024 season was Integration and Test Lead. Here, alongside my team, I built and maintained our fleet of aircraft to nominal and adjusted them for desired tests. I spent many hours reconfiguring and testing planes, quadcopters, and hexacopters for aerial footage collection, GNC algorithm tests, and payload deployment testing. That frequently included designing custom brackets for mounting servo release mechanisms, cameras, motor mounts, or other components. In the later months, as some teams fell behind, I took on additional roles for the payload housing and release mechanism itself.
This is my second year on PART. In my first year, I was part of the airframe team (integration and testing hadn’t made a separate division yet, so this was also I&T work). Here, I spent my time assisting with a better version of the nose gear, while also machining the molds for the carbon fiber skins and supporting the general construction of the vehicle.