Overall project review and Lessons Learned
Nur Harell
In only 10 weeks, Team SPAERO has planned, designed and built an autonomous flying UAV from scratch. From the basic design to the highly sophisticated dynamic navigation algorithm, the entire team worked closely together to master the complex and ambitious mission to find and extinguish simulated fires in Lake Lagunita at Stanford University.
In order to take advantage of the different teammate's strengths and in order to work efficiently, team SPAERO divided itself into different disciplines, each teammate being responsible for one of them. This can be reviewed on our Team page. In order to coordinate the project and to ensure a smooth workflow, Team progress meetings were held twice weekly. These meetings turned out to be an extraordinary platform for ensuring well functioning interdisciplinary communication as well as for discussing game-changing decisions. In addition, an ambitious Plan of Action (introduced in Problem Sets 1, 2 and 3) was set up to keep the team on track and make sure that all the work was delivered on time.
Overall, the Plan of Action was followed as expected. All the different disciplines within Team SPAERO have worked closely together to master the mission. An important lesson learned during the project is the importance of experimental vs. simulated/calculated data. Whether in the design process, for Controls or for the Mission Planing, experimental data proved to be of highest value. For that reason, the team went away from its original approach to design one prototype to a multi-prototype approach. However, attention to detail was still a very important guideline throughout the project. Building two high quality prototypes is still considered to be better then building 5 or 6 poor quality ones with incremental improvements. In retrospect, it might have been better for the Mission Planning team to continue flying with the SPAERO 1 or the Bixler 2 while the SPAERO 2 was still in manufacturing to gain early first experimental insights.
A big focus throughout the project was put on team building. Activities unrelated to the project were held each time an important milestone was reached (Problem Set, First Flight, etc.). These events enabled the teammates to get to know each other better and offered an excellent opportunity to relax from the stressful project work. This approach is regarded by all teammates as highly effective in improving the team dynamics.
Another important lesson is the importance of looking closely at the competition rules. Focusing entirely on manufacturing a highly qualitative airplane and sophisticated path algorithms, the team missed a loophole in the competition rules that allowed design deficits to be compensated by a large number of flights. From a pure competitive point of view, missing this point cost team SPAERO the 1st place to a team which was smart to detect and exploit this fact by including it into their design strategy.
Moreover, a non-conventional and probably non-ideal aircraft configuration was picked for the sake of building an interesting and cool looking airplane. However, the main goal of the course from team SPAERO's point of view was to learn as much as possible about designing and building autonomous flying drones and also, to have fun! From that perspective, Team SPAERO is in agreement to have taken the right path.
All in all, AA241x was a highly challenging but equally fun course in which all teammates were able to broaden their horizons in terms of their engineering skills as well as teamwork. The team would like to thank Professor Alonso as well as Adrien and Robbie for offering this course and for their continuous support throughout the quarter.
Team SPAERO
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