GoAERO Prize

GoAERO is a multi-year international competition to build emergency response flyers that can reach disaster zones and carry people out. Aircraft are designed for a single occupant, and in the finals a 57 kg manikin rides in place of a person. Our entry is a multirotor rescue drone with a one-person payload.

I co-founded the team and lead a student group of more than 20 people. The team received the NASA Innovation Award.

Overall design and competition strategy

My main responsibility is the overall design of the aircraft and our competition strategy. Starting from the mission rules, I set the concept of operations and the design requirements, then compared energy source options, generated and down-selected configurations, sized the aircraft, and predicted how it would perform in each mission. The competition scores several different missions, and no aircraft can be the best at all of them, so a large part of the job is deciding where to trade performance.

I also own the interface control document and the verification and validation process across the mechanical, avionics, and energy systems; multidisciplinary optimization cut mission turnaround time by 20%. I run staged cross-functional design reviews and use Jira to break system requirements down into testable subsystem specifications and acceptance criteria, so the sub-teams can work in parallel.

Mechanical design

I also contributed to the mechanical design: I modelled and assembled the primary load-bearing truss in SolidWorks and ran finite element analysis on it through more than 15 load cases, making sure the structure meets both strength and stiffness requirements at 2g.

Our Stage 1 design report is below.

Images

Exterior render

Cabin and payload render

Team photo

FEA of the load-bearing truss in SolidWorks

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