Competition
Design Build Fly: Fixed-Wing UAV
Purdue's senior design competition — designing, building, and flying a fixed-wing drone from scratch, winning first place in mission, design, and innovation.
Purdue’s senior design competition, in which each team designs, builds, and flies a fixed-wing drone from scratch. Out of four main awards, our team won first place in three: mission, design, and innovation.
I led the full development cycle, from the overall layout and airframe fabrication (with some parts 3D-printed) through to flight testing. Working in SolidWorks with parametric models, I independently designed an extensible modular payload bay with a quick-change mechanism; physical integration testing showed it could switch quickly between several different payloads.
I proposed a number of structural weight-saving and stiffness-compensation changes, all of which were adopted. Together with a cross-functional team of six, I ran more than ten rounds of iterative testing, improving payload efficiency by 12% and streamlining final assembly.