Matthew Archibald

ASME IAM3D Racing Drone – 2nd Place

Written by

matthew

in

, ,

My team and I competed, and won 2nd place in the 2020 American Society of Engineering IAM3D racing drone competition. It was a huge learning experience with many hurdles to overcome, all within a busy semester of school! This is information about the competition, how we approached it, and ultimately scored very well.

Rules:

  • Drone should be entirely 3D printed
    • Excluding electronics and hardware
  • Drone must fly a racing course as fast as possible
  • Drone must pickup, fly with, then drop off 1x1x1 inch cubes with a ferromagnetic washer on top

Scoring

  • Percentage of 3D printed parts
  • Time to complete racing course
    • including transporting the cubes around the course
  • Technical write up and design
The first frame was a unibody design with integrated mounting for the motors, and electronics. The diagonal motor spacing was the largest possible while still fitting on a 220×220 mm build plate. Although it withstood the most crashes, and was quite durable, it was a pain to work on, and required the whole frame to be replaced if anything broke. This was time consuming, and the limited space made a drive system impossible to integrate

When the university section of ASME announced the racing drone competition, I was immediately hooked. I had been building and flying race drones on my own for a couple years already, and the prospect of pitting my skills against other’s in an engineering competition excited me. As a group was formed, I was set as team lead despite being just a sophomore, my experience with drones, and leadership was wanted. As I recall, the project had a few main focus categories.

Frame design and construction

This includes the 3D models, and printed parts that constitute the body, arms, wheel system and includes mounting holes for the motors, battery, electronics, electromagnet, and wheels.

Ground control system

This includes the physical ground maneuvering system that allows the operator to drive the drone towards a cube and pick it up

Payload pick up/drop off

This includes the physical mechanism, and/or electrical design that would allow for quick and reliable payload transport.

Electronics

This includes all the electronics required for the flight system, along with the systems integration with the ground control, and payload systems.

An early frame design, notice how the bottom plate strongly mimics carbon fiber frames. This was a very weak frame design, and was never actually used. The arms are very similar to the final version, just a little shorter, and with holes intended to reduce weight. The holes did not reduce weight, since they ended up being printed with more wall material than the infill would have been, they were also weaker.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts