Making QADT a force to be reckoned with.
Queen’s Aerospace Design Team (QADT) is a combination team of Aerospace Design and Aerial Robotics at Queen’s University, building a platform for competition at the 2023-24 Annual Aerial Evolution Canada Student competition. The focus of the competition is on Urban Air Mobility (UAM) to provide greater mobility through the use of autonomous VTOL platforms.
After COVID, the team required a ground-up reconstruction of the way we thought about, designed, and built aerial vehicles, so I used the opportunity to leverage my experience at Aurora Flights Sciences while building their newest design program.
Our cutting-edge design playbook:
Using the competition rules to feed our team-developed aircraft optimization tool allowed us to explore massive design regions by leveraging modern Python packages to expedite design. Once an aircraft that fulfilled the design criteria was achieved, we could add detail to the OML through stability and controls modelling, before releasing the OML to structure to build and assemble the aircraft. The diagrams below are illustrations, actual results and competition aircraft will be released after the competition.
