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The Turkish team was named Grand Champion at the IMechE event in rural Leicestershire yesterday (29 June), beating 18 other teams. The ITU ATA team also scooped the Innovation Award for their unmanned aerial system (UAS).
The winning drone had a largely conventional design compared to some other entries to the student competition, with a fixed-wing airframe and single propeller at the front. A large wingspan was aimed at maximising the payload weight – in the challenge, a simulated humanitarian aid package.
The aircraft was “designed to make it easy to operate, [with a] modular system and autonomous,” said team leader Yagiz Tokgöz to Professional Engineering. The approach was aimed at straightforward and repeatable operation.
The UAS was flying so well that it struggled to land after the last flight because of the gusty wind, Tokgöz joked – a nicer problem to have than issues taking off, which many teams face.
For many at the event, however, the drone’s standout feature was its innovative payload drop mechanism, designed to release the package from challenge partner AirDropBox.
Conventional drop mechanisms, used by many of the teams at this week’s event, use a servo to pull a bar out of a hole, letting the bar drop and releasing the payload.
“It's an effective system, it works well – it's pretty basic, it's fairly reliable,” said Michael Cook, design engineer at AirDropBox.
The ITU ATA team took a different approach, with short loops of nichrome wire around straps on the payload, secured by fishing line.
“Nichrome wire, when you run a current through it, it heats up,” said Cook. “When they want to release, they run a current through the nichrome wires, it heats up, melts the fishing line, and just drops instantly.
“The advantage of that is because of the way they've got it hooked up, their straps are extremely short, so there's virtually nothing dangling off the underside of the aircraft. And instead of having a servo and a drawbar – which even with a very lightweight servo still weighs something – they've essentially got virtually negligible weight in their drop mechanism, and it’s extremely reliable because there’s nothing to mechanically go wrong with it.”
The design reduced the drop mechanism to virtually “zero weight”, he added, allowing the aircraft to carry a 1.7kg payload, more than many other teams.
“It’s an outstanding piece of innovation… this is the first we've ever seen of this in the world. No other drone manufacturer has come up with this,” said George Cook, inventor at AirDropBox.
It will “100%” be replicated by commercial manufacturers in future, he added. “It's lighter, simpler, more reliable than anything that's gone before, and it's just a stroke of simplicity.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.