Contributor
Flying a drone has always been a risky business, especially in a competition. Failures can occur that were never seen in practice. Crashes can cause hundreds of dollars in damage and usually happen at the worst time.
While there were a few hiccups, failure was not an option for the Belmont Aerospace Student Society (BASS). After taking first place in the New England Regional Aerospace Robotics Competition (ARC) last year, the team was again triumphant, taking first place at the national competition in Southern California earlier this month.
Hosted by STEM-ED, a nonprofit organization, the ARC competition has teams of four to six high school students assemble quadcopter drone kits [an unmanned aircraft with four helicopter-like rotors to provide lift and guidance], design mechanisms attached to the drones for accomplishing mission tasks, program the drones to fly an autonomous mission, and pilot the drones to fly head-to-head semi-autonomous missions against other teams. The team is also required to give a presentation for the judges, describing the work they did and explaining their methods, processes, and team dynamics.
The mission of STEM-ED is to offer accessible and hands-on engineering experiences to middle and high school students.
This was the second year for the Belmont team, which included Perry Cai, captain; Harry Coldwell, pilot; Jacob Nasipak, co-pilot; and Hao Huang, lieutenant. In 2023, Julian Halpern-Smith was captain, and Alexander Angelov also participated.
According to Charles Coldwell, father of team pilot Harry Coldwell, when the team arrived in California, they took the drone out for a test flight, but things went awry. The drone came down hard, cracking the power distribution board, which is a structural part of the fuselage (the main body of the craft). Even after repairs were made, the motors weren’t working quite right. Eventually, however, the drone was put in good enough condition to pass the technical inspection, Coldwell said.
Once at the competition, BASS gave a presentation for the judges about their mechanism design, budget, and schedule, emphasizing the design philosophy of maximizing the margin for error, keeping the mechanism as simple and robust as possible, and spending as much time as possible practicing for competition.
After a short, careful test flight, the team competed in a five-minute autonomous flight in which the drone was required to hover over a set point, land on another point, take off again, and drop a water balloon on the third site before returning to the launch position. A popped balloon marred the team’s flight slightly, and the GPS showed an error. However, Coldwell said, “our flight was much better than our New England regionals flight and better than many of the teams in the nationals.”
The next section of competition was the semi-autonomous phase, in which the drones pick up tennis and wiffle balls and drop them in different sized baskets.
“Most teams felt they were doing well if they managed to pick up a couple of balls, and they were doing really well if they managed to sink at least one of them,” Coldwell said.
Belmont sank two tennis balls in the first heat, and picked up five wiffle balls, getting two in the basket, and did similarly well in the second heat, which landed them at the top of the podium once again.
