Airbus believes in the potential of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) to transform our cities for the better, and has a goal to develop sustainable mobility systems that bring maximal societal benefit while causing minimal environmental impact. One of the challenges to developing a low operating cost UAM system with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is to be able to turn around the aircraft quickly between flights to increase aircraft utilization. The student team worked to develop an automated battery swapping system with minimal human oversight for eVTOL aircraft.

The Baton is an unmanned aerial, precision-delivery system. The Baton has two basic functions of payload delivery: 1) for critical supplies (e.g. blood plasma or anti-venom) and 2) landing a sensor or sensors (e.g. a matrix of sensors such as temperature, sound, or video monitors). The current prototype system is designed to be dropped from another manned or unmanned aircraft. The Baton would recover from the tumble, activate the motors, and fly to a designated location. The student team worked to refine the design and significantly increase reliability, functionality, and utility of the Baton system.

The smaller regional jet market currently has products that are based upon designs from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Boeing forecasts a 2,240-unit regional aircraft market over the next 20 years. This presents an opportunity to develop new regional aircraft to satisfy the 50-seat portion of the market that meets the US domestic “Scope Clause” that has significantly better fuel burn and economics than existing options, and a ~76 seat stretch derivative to be designed as part of this regional jet airplane family. The student team worked to design and analyze both 50-seat and 76-seat jets.

Real-world airfoil performance is impacted by irregularities in the section shape compared to the intended design. Careful manufacturing can produce shapes with the appropriate level of tolerance; however the effects of real-world contamination, such as rain, hail, icing, bugs, erosion, and corrosion, can have a critical impact on performance. These effects are important for many applications which are experiencing current and future growth, such as remote autonomous vehicles, high altitude aircraft, long endurance vehicles, delivery UAVs, wind energy devices, and underwater vehicles. These applications typically require high endurance and operate at high lift coefficients to optimize their performance. In addition, these applications locate the vehicles in difficult operating conditions (icing, saltwater exposure, etc.) for long periods of time with little or no opportunity for maintenance or inspection, exacerbating the impact on the performance of these emerging vehicles. The student team worked to understand the types of protuberances common in various applications of high lift, high-endurance airfoils.

The Vulcan Conservation UAV is used in Africa by scouts and rangers, in real time, to deny materials and territory to poachers and produce evidence of their activities. As examples, poachers drive in trucks, setup camps, and deploy barbed wire to indiscriminately snare roaming animals. The student team worked to improve UAV flight duration to enhance the capability of detecting and tracking poachers in Africa and elsewhere.