Four times the fun
The first day of the class, there were students who couldn’t believe their eyes. Many even broke out their phones to capture video for friends who probably wouldn’t imagine something so cool.
For the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering students at Concordia, this was heaven.
That’s because for the first time anywhere, the Quanser Qball-X4 – a 1.4-kilogram quadrotor helicopter with four 25-centimetre propellers protected by a one-metre diameter, 80-sided (octacontagon) carbon fibre cage – is being used as a teaching tool.
In fact, this is the first time any quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is being used in the classroom.
“The purpose of the class, MECH 480/6091 - Flight Control Systems, is to teach students the concept of flight and flight dynamics, as well as how to design an autopilot,” says Mechanical and Industrial Engineering professor Youmin Zhang, who teaches the undergraduate course.
The course itself is also pretty cool not only for its content, but for its breadth of student appeal. It welcomes third- and fourth-year undergraduates, and graduate students up to the doctoral level who are taking the course to boost their expertise.
The five Qballs Concordia bought last fall give the class’s 35 students a unique opportunity to develop automatic flight control functions for UAVs and to test them safely in a special teaching lab in the Henry F. Hall Building.
Students aren’t learning to control the quadrotor with a joystick. Rather, they develop algorithms that guide the helicopter along a preset path.
To gauge the Qball’s accuracy along its flight, the lab has six cameras capturing locations along x, y, and z axes. The data, complete with recordings of deviations due to environmental disturbances or formula flaws, is then compared with the original established path.
Zhang is convinced that the knowledge and experience students gain could give them an edge in the aeronautics industry; knowing how to control UAVs means greatly reducing the risk of human casualties in many airborne applications.
Real-world use of these algorithms in UAVs includes the surveillance of treacherous terrain or disaster zones, guiding an aircraft accurately and safely from city to city, or even helping a plane stabilize and land safely after it loses a portion of a wing.
Related links:
• Concordia Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
• Youmin Zhang’s webpage
• Videos of experiments in MECH 480/6091 Flight Control Systems
• Quanser Qball-X4