SUAS 2025
About
SUAS 2025 is a drone competition hosted in America where we have to design and build a fixed-wing aircraft which can fly for more than 30 minutes, recognise objects automatically through a camera and deploy 4 payloads; all whilst being fully autonomous. The project will have many technical challenges ranging from creating a lightweight fuselage to developing a robust object detection camera system.
Design
The aircraft which we are developing for the SUAS 2025 competition is a fixed-wing plane with a 2m wingspan constructed from carbon fibre, plywood, XPS foam and 3D printed materials. A fixed-wing configuration was chosen due to the higher efficiency requirements of the competition; flying for at most 15 miles over a 30 minute window whilst mapping out a 12 acre area and identifying objects on a runway to accurately deploy payloads to their locations. The wings are constructed using XPS foam cut with a hot wire to match the NACA 5414 high-lift airfoil with HT-LW-PLA being used to 3D print lightweight wingtips which are then attached.
On the day of the competition there will be 4 objects (from an original list of 15) placed on the runway, these will have to be detected mid-flight with a GoPro connected to a Raspberry Pi 5 on the aircraft. Once the objects have been detected and classified, the flight plan will need to be updated in real-time so we can deploy the 4 airdrops to their respective locations. The airdrops all carry a safety beacon as the payload along with electronics on a custom PCB which uses a barometer to release a parachute at the appropriate altitude to slow the fall of the payload.
