Building autonomous aircraft wasn’t just another class to Samantha Woodward, an Intelligent Systems Engineering major at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. It was a passion, a “joy” as she called it, an opportunity through the hands-on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) course to push the academic envelope, and learn by doing.
“We were able to create an autonomous aircraft from start to finish and then test it,” Woodward said. “We learned the basics of aerodynamics, built an airplane, and then wrote our own autopilot software. There aren’t many classes where you create a system from start to finish, so this was very rewarding.”
This kind of reward came from the UAS course taught by Or Dantsker, assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering. Dantsker said the class consists of two parts: lecture/theory and hands-on lab. The students first learn about the underlying physics, dynamics control and guidance of fixed-wing electric unmanned aircraft during the lecture/theory part of the class. They then go to a lab to work in teams to interface, control and debug autopilot sensors and aircraft hardware to incrementally build unmanned aircraft. The students built autopilots using Arduino, an open-sourced prototype platform that allows users to create interactive electronic objects.
And at the end of the semester, the students field tested their autonomous aircraft in a flyoff at the Monroe County Radio Control Club north of Bloomington.
“After writing code every week to tackle a different aspect of the software,” Woodward said, “Or manually flew our planes and then he switched them from manual mode to autonomous mode. Some planes performed better than others due to the different parameters teams had set in their software.
“I wish we had more time so we could have tested multiple times and then adjusted the code to see a better performance. In all, getting away from campus to test the planes was a great way to end the semester.”
Throughout the semester, students also had multiple opportunities to interact with, and learn from, industry guest speakers such as Boeing’s Phantom Works, the company’s defense, space and security advanced research, development and prototyping division; and Blue Origin, the space/rocket company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Discussions centered on systems engineering, aerodynamic design, and reinforcement learning, and applications to unmanned systems.
Dantsker said this course, along with the ISE department’s Autonomous Sports class, are designed with experiential learning as the core philosophy. They are geared toward advanced undergraduates and graduate students to allow them to apply their prerequisite engineering, physics and mathematics knowledge to these hardware-lab-heavy courses.
“This course is about more than just building aircraft,” Dantsker said. “It’s about giving students the skills and confidence to tackle real-world challenges.
“By the end of the semester, they’ve gone from learning the basics to seeing their own designs take flight. It’s a hands-on experience that goes beyond theory, giving students the tools and motivation to tackle complex problems in engineering and technology.”