Goals For this Year
- Primary Goal: Land a model rocket!
- Starting from a ~25 foot tower, drop the rocket and have a controlled vertical landing
- Secondary Goal: Launch and land a model rocket
- Starting from a launch pad, use a two-stage motor system to launch the rocket up, then have a controlled vertical landing
How We're Gonna DO it
Throughout the Fall 2022-Spring 2023 school year, we are continuing to design and implement new features for our rocket:
- Mechanical:
- Throttling – adjusting the thrust from our motor mid-flight using a flow control system
- Reaction wheel – implementing new system to mechanically control the rocket’s yaw during flight
- Redesigned landing legs – investigating new designs to absorb impact forces upon landing
- Automated launch and landing pad – designing a pad to automatically level, stabilize, and ignite the rocket during takeoff, as well as provide a target for landings
- Two-stage motor mount – designing a new mount to house a multi-stage motor system, essential for launch-and-landing missions
- Avionics and GNC:
- Integration of new sensors – adding barometer, magnetometer, and lidar sensors to collect more data during flight
- Computer vision – using a camera to gather data allowing us to calculate the rocket’s position and attitude
- Flight computer upgrade – a new flight computer, designed in-house, will interface with our new sensors and a Raspberry Pi board
- Navigation algorithm overhaul – improving the rocket’s ability to track its own state by implementing a new Extended Kalman filter algorithm
- Improved control algorithm – using adaptive control gains to account for throttling and other variations in the rocket’s thrust mid-flight