Students’ design progressing to next stage of competition in May
Photo courtesy of UVic AERO club.
UVic AERO — a student club that designs, builds, and tests unmanned aerial systems (UAS) — won first place in the initial phase of the national student UAS competition, run by the Aerial Evolution Association of Canada (AEAC).
The competition is split into two phases; the first tests competitors’ design concepts, and the second is an operational demonstration in “actual flight scenarios.”
Every year, competitors in the student UAS competition are given a specific scenario which their design has to meet. Last year, UVic AERO President Alex Rome said their design had to safely transport four Barbie dolls, with enough space for headroom and luggage. This year, the competition is designed around fighting wildfires.
Fighting wildfires is personal to Rome, whose hometown is Kamloops, B.C.
“Everyone knows someone who’s been affected by wildfires,” said Rome. “They’re becoming more frequent and more severe. … [It’s] a competition that is not only cool and interesting, but directly applicable to communities and society. As an engineer, you’re supposed to solve problems, you’re supposed to help the world.”
Asher Barnsdale, Chief Engineer of UVic AERO, explained the drone’s intended purpose.
“What our drone is supposed to do is take off, fly to a location where you can see smoke or something, [where] it will fly around and essentially map out the hotspots in real life,” he said.
From there, the drone returns to base, where it is equipped with a bucket, fills up on water from a nearby source, and returns to dump water on the hotspots.
Barnsdale told the Martlet that the drone is not designed to combat huge, raging fires like those seen in California earlier this year, or Jasper, Alberta last year. “But it could be effective at preventing early wildfires from turning into something bigger,” he said.
Their design, the Firefly, is a standard hexacopter — a helicopter-like design with six motorized propellers. What makes it special is the unique bucket design the team has integrated, which makes it able to fill faster and in a wider range of scenarios.
Most other firefighting designs used by helicopters involve either pumping water gradually into the bucket with a hose, or dragging the bucket along the water’s surface to fill it that way. UVic AERO’s design uses a “plunge to fill” method, which involves a flap on the bucket that gradually lifts as water enters, snapping into place once full.
“It means that we can fill from a really small body of water, because if you want to drag to fill, you need a long stretch of water, or you need enough time for it to settle and then sink.… We avoid that problem by essentially just using the drone to push it under and then lift,” said Barnsdale.
Photo courtesy of UVic AERO club.
Rome says the team is “blown away” by winning first place in the design phase. He added that the honour is especially meaningful because the aerospace engineering specialty isn’t widely offered in Canada.
“It’s not really offered on this side of Canada at all, there’s no real specializations, degrees, or anything that’s really offered outside of club work,” he said, so the team’s ability to come in first is all the more impressive. Outside of UBC, most of the Canadian universities which offer an aerospace program are located further east.
“We’re doing quite well, considering that we’re more kind of the up-and-up, ragtag kind of band [compared] to them, because they have more people, more funding, more support.”
Outside of the competition, UVic AERO is focused on growing their team, after it was hit particularly hard during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the members of UVic AERO at that time graduated, and the online semesters gave prospective members little opportunity to access their knowledge or gain hands-on experience.
“We basically had to start from the ground up, rebuilding the club and rebuilding our knowledge, because so much area of expertise was lost,” said Rome. “We had to kind of create this new culture of knowledge transfer … because there was just nothing for us to work on.”
Barnsdale, meanwhile, hopes to see students from a wider subsection of UVic’s population get interested and involved with UVic AERO. “We also need business people … [and] it’d be really cool if we had some art students,” he said. “But it’s really hard for us to [reach out] to these people, because they tend not to think that our booth is for them.”
The next phase of the competition takes place from May 9 to 11 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. With just over a month to prepare, between now and the competition, the UVic AERO team is hard at work assembling and testing parts of the Firefly. This involves testing not just the physical function of the drone, but making sure the code works, too.
