MAE 154S and news/thoughts

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 154S is a class I'm currently finishing up (poorly) for Fall quarter at UCLA. It's titled "Flight Mechanics, Stability, and Control of Aircraft" and will prove pretty important to what we're trying to do here. We're doing a fairly rough run through of aircraft stability and control, exactly what needs to be studied to get a plane to fly. The great thing is that our professor, Damien Toohey, has done exactly what we're trying to do now, but as a graduate student. He's expressed a lot of interest in the project and will probably be a valuable source of experience.

Anyway, I just wanted to jot down some thoughts on the team while I'm at it. The team itself hasn't been set up yet actually. I'm planning on setting up a kick off meeting early second week of Winter quarter and having the team down by third week. Hopefully we'll be picking up a lot of the DBF (Design/Build/Fly) members as well as finding some specialized electronics, software, and stability people.

I'm starting to realize that the stability and controls side of things is probably the most important part. The controls dictates what the programmers have to program while both stability and controls dictates what sensors and electronics we need. It's then up to the electronics to get the proper information. Controls doesn't care whether or not we get attitude using GPS or IMUs (Inertial Measurement Unit), they just want to know it. Same goes for software, controls doesn't want to know how to tell a servo to deflect a certain angle, they just know that the rudder needs to be deflected so much to maintain stability. With this in mind, I'm hoping to take some time to set up the team structure into "modules," much like black boxes. The encapsulation should help with each module concentrating on obtaining high quality results. Of course interaction between modules to maintain proper direction is both necessary and wanted. Classic client-contractor setup.

In terms of hardware, that's still kind of a blur. I am playing with the Arduino right now and it looks fairly capable of what we want to do. However, a single unit wouldn't do it so we'd probably have to get multiple microcontrollers to work together. However, that involves interfacing directly with the microcontroller, which is what the Arduino was designed to do. Looks fun but might be more complication than it's worth. With that in mind we're looking towards using Gumstix as a single powerful unit. There are also more powerful microcontrollers we can try. I feel inclined to keep this fairly low level but that's mostly out of personal preference at the moment. Keeping things low-level does have its advantages however: more knowledge for future use, more capabilities, a more customized solution, etc.

For stability and controls, I'm hoping to get a good simulation up and running that's easy to interface to. Damien Toohey has written one and I've been thinking about taking it and modifying it to our project. When first going into the project I felt that it would simply "be nice" to have an active simulator, but I'm starting to realize that it might be an integral part of the project. By having a simulator that we can both fly manually and through our program; we can get a feel for how to control the plane as well as dry-test our algorithms. Personally I would like to have my own programmed or derived off of Toohey's, but whether the time investment would be worth it is a concern for me. I've been looking into other flight sims like FlightGear but I'm not liking what I see so far. I'll probably know what I want to do once I get my hands on Toohey's flight simulator.