My senior design project was with 9 other mechanical and aerospace engineering seniors to compete in the 2nd Argonia Cup. The objective of this collegiate rocketry competition is to bring a golf ball payload to 8000 feet and return it as close to the launch site as possible. We felt a deployable autonomous quadcopter was the best option. Most of our team worked on the quad which would also serve as the rocket nosecone on ascent, then separate from the rocket, pop open spring-loaded arms and rotors, turn on and return to the launch site. The rocket would use dual-deployment via parachutes to safely touchdown like a regular high-power rocket.
I led the structures team wrapping our own fiberglass tubes and sheets as well as building the rockets with epoxy, and handling recovery electronics. We only got 1 test flight before the competition, and ultimately the quad failed, crashing into the ground from 8500 feet. We do believe the quad did something because its location on the ground differed from a calculation of a ballistic crash from apogee. It was an awesome semester, and I loved my team members. We had a lot of fun and made for an effective group. I wrote a lengthy post on this project as my final semester of undergrad here in this blog post.
This is the poster we made to summarize our project:
Poster-v1.4Finally, this is the paper we wrote detailing our entire project (as best as we could right before graduation):