By SARAH COHEN
Project teams, a mainstay of the School of Engineering, are student groups which design and build planes, underwater vehicles, cars, and so much more for use in annual national and international competitions. Through project teams, students obtain real-world experience, learn skills classrooms don’t teach, and create bonds of friendship alongside creating their project.
“You learn how to be an engineer by being an engineer,” said Kimberly Sheriff ’13, former team lead of Baja SAE.
Project teams are often interdisciplinary and incorporate several different aspects of the engineering school along with a business side that aids with recruitment and sponsorship. In return for the many hours they put in, students get course credit for being a part of a project team.
“It’s a great experience for getting a job, not only do companies know what we do, you also learn useful skills you don’t necessarily get in classes, said Alex Masetti ’14, outgoing team leader of Baja SAE.
Project teams are also involved with outreach projects including partnerships with local schools, boy and girl scout troops and the Sciencecenter, said Phillip Tischler ’14, outgoing team lead of CUAir.
This past summer, three teams won first place in their respective competitions.
CUAir
The Cornell University Unmanned Air Systems Team, CUAir, builds an autonomous reconnaissance aircraft.
“Autonomous means that the plane more or less flies itself – the computer flies the plane versus someone with joysticks flying it around,” Joel Heck ’14, team leader, said.
For the summer Student Unmanned Air Systems competition in Maryland each year, according to Heck, the plane must fly around a grid on autopilot to various GPS coordinates. It does this by using data from sensors on the plane and a GPS. The plane must also use a camera to find and photograph targets on the ground during flight. From these photographs, the team must be able to identify the color of the target and the letters or numbers labeled on the target both manually and autonomously, using a computer program, Heck said.
According to Heck, CUAir is divided into five subteams. The airframe subteam creates the aircraft and its mechanical systems. The software subteam designs the software used by the plane’s ground station. The electrical subteam works on the plane’s power system and works with the software subteam to design a communications system. The autopilot subteam works on tuning and maintaining the autopilot system, especially during competition and test flights. Finally, the business subteam works on marketing, sponsorships, and promotion of the team.
The three-day competition, takes place at the Patuxent Naval Air Station and is sponsored by both the Office of Naval Research and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, according to Tischler. Over 30 teams from India, Canada, Turkey and the U.S. competed in this year’s competition.
On the first day of competition, each team gives a presentation and performs a safety check with the competition’s sponsors and judges. On the other days, according to Heck, each team has a single chance to perform its flights.
“You only get once chance to really fly, and if something goes wrong, you’re done,” Heck said.
Although last year CUAir won first in the mission portion of the contest, this year they came in first place overall, Tischler said. Several modifications made in the past year led to the victory.
“In past years, we just bought a model that anybody could buy of the Internet and then modified it to our purposes,” Heck said. “This year, we made our own design so that we could make the design fit our project.”
The plane is completely custom built and was designed by several members of the team last year as a senior project. The plane is larger than it was in past years, Heck said, but it is sturdier because it is entirely made of foam and fiberglass and other composite materials. Composite materials are made of more than one original material but have different physical and chemical properties than any of the original materials.
Another new feature is a new antenna tracker, Heck said. In previous years, a member of the team would control the antenna at the ground station. This method was unreliable and was replaced this year by a new automated system, according to Heck.
CUAir tests its plane at the Ithaca Radio Control Society Field. Tests of all systems occur throughout the school year even before the competition plane is built in December and January.
For next year, according to Heck, CUAir plans to work to create an autonomous, rather than manual, takeoff and landing system.
CUAir recruits at the beginning of both fall and spring semester.
Courtesy of Rutna Gadh ’14
Baja SAE
One of the two car teams at Cornell, Baja SAE builds an offroad all-weather racing vehicle.
This year is Baja’s tenth anniversary as a project team on campus, and they have won three competitions in the past four years according to Matt Allen ’14, team leader.
Although the team is largely comprised of mechanical engineers, according to Allen, the six subteams – electronics, composite,frame, drivetrain, suspension, and business – bring in a range of other majors as well.
The team practices on a dirtbike track owned by a local woman. The track, full of hills ditches, jumps, and, in some places, thick vegetation, is a good approximation for the conditions of the real competition, according to Masetti.
There are three Baja competitions each year. Cornell traditionally competes in both the Midwest and Eastern competitions because they are closer than the one in the West, according to Andrew Crego ’14, team leader.
The competition lasts four days. The first two days are given to static judging including a design presentation and a cost report. According to Masetti, the cost report encourages teams to avoid “a ridiculously extreme budget.”
The third day of competition involves short dynamic challenges including a sled pull, where the car must drag a weight as far as it can, an acceleration test, a maneuverability test, and a suspension test. According to Masetti, the suspension test is designed to demonstrate the car’s durability with a course full of large rocks, holes, culverts and other obstacles.
The final day of competition is the four hour wheel-to-wheel race. The car that completes the most laps wins. During this high-intensity race, drivers push their cars to the limit because it is the final event, according to Allen.
“People are doing all kinds of crazy low-resources repairs to keep [their cars] going,” Allen said.
But the final day’s score is only a part of the overall score, which includes points from all the days’ events.
“You can definitely win the race and not win the competition,” Allen said.
This year, the team won first or second place in several events, but only won the entire competition by less than two points, according to Allen.
Although a new car is built from scratch each year, information is handed down from one year to the next by older members and alumni of the team, according to Allen. This allows better parts of the cars to remain and weaker points in design to continuously be improved based on experience and advice of older members combined with new ideas of new people on the team.
One thing that made this year’s car stand out from all the rest at competition was that it, weighing only 290 pounds, was the lightest car Cornell’s team has ever produced.
“We are also pretty sure it is the lightest car that Baja [the competition] has ever seen,” Allen said.
A lightweight car is important because every team must use the same unaltered, 10 horsepower lawnmower engine. So the more weight a team can take off a car, the faster it can go, Crego said. This is important since most of the dynamic events are time-based. The Baja team made their car extremely lightweight by making it almost entirely out of aluminum, including the suspension.
“The judges were a little skeptical about that at first but we proved that it could work,” Allen said.
The car, according to Masetti, can go around 35 miles per hour at top speed.
This year, according to Crego, the Baja team is looking to improve their string of successes by beginning to aim for a bigger prize: the Iron Team Award. The Iron Team Award is given to a team if their car is the best in all three national competitions in the same year.
Baja SAE holds recruitment at the beginning of both fall and spring semesters.
Courtesy of Kimberly Sheriff ’13
CUAUV
The Cornell Autonomous Underwater Vehicle project team builds an autonomous robotic submarine which can perform various visual and auditory tasks.
Over forty students across 10 majors in three colleges are a part of the team. The team is made up of four subteams: mechanical, electrical, software, and business and uses Teagle pool as a testing site, according to Markus Burkardt ’14, team leader.
Each year, a new submarine is built from scratch, according to Kuen-Kuen Sim ’14.
“Every piece of metal or plastic that is within our capability to manufacture, we’ll try to make a new iteration because there are always things to improve,” Sim said.
According to Alex Spitzer ’16, however, most of the code is reused from year to year.
“We build on the code from previous years so the sub gets smarter,” Spitzer said.
Tasks the submarine must perform include ramming colored buoys, firing torpedoes through targets, controlling a steering wheel, finding objects based on auditory clues and navigating from one obstacle to the next, according to Burkardt.
To enable the submarine to accomplish these tasks without being manually controlled, the team writes software to control the vehicle and guide it through missions. These missions have several layers and are originally based on data from the camera and other sensors on the vehicle, Spitzer said. From the sensory data, it follows a program.
For example, according to Burkardt, in order to ram a colored buoy, the submarine will think in the following way: once the submarine sees an object that it recognizes as a buoy, it will center on the buoy; try to get closer to the buoy; drive forward into the buoy; stop and back away from the buoy. The submarine will then look for another thing it recognizes and follow the proper command sequence that stems from the new visual or auditory data.
The RoboSub Competition is held in San Diego, California and is sponsored by AUVSI and the Office of Naval Research, according to Burkardt. Final testing takes place in a hotel pool before the six day competition begins.
The first three days of the competition, according to Burkardt, involve practices in the outdoor competition pool. After that, the course is scrambled for the semi-finals. To make the semi-final round, each submarine must drive through the validation gate at some point during the practice days. The validation gate is a relatively narrow passage that tests the vehicle’s ability to drive straight and navigate properly.
“It is a lot more difficult than you would think,” Burkardt said.
The fourth and fifth days of the competition involve one run per day through the course for each semi-finalist.
Times are chosen based on order of qualification, and scores in static judging categories including journal paper, website, and promotional video.
The eight to 10 best semifinalists advance to the final round on the last day of the competition where each vehicle has one chance to navigate the newly re-scrambled course. Overall rankings are solely based on the final day’s score, according to Burkardt.
One key to this year’s success was the improvements made to the visual systems, according to Spitzer. Because the submarine, this year named Ragnarok, requires sensory data, such as visual data, to start each of its mission sequences, it is important to see objects clearly while underwater. Identifying objects, especially by color, is a difficult challenge, Spitzer said.
“Between the sun and the clouds there is a wide range of colors you can get for the same exact object,” Spitzer said. “If it is cloudy,you might see an orange pipeline perfectly, but then when it is sunny, the sub doesn’t know that there is a pipeline because it may look white.”
CUAUV recruits at the beginning of the fall semester.
Courtesy of Sean Chayanupatkul ’14