Ever wonder what it’s like to dance with a drone? Here are two EPAD (engineering, physics & applied design) students doing the compass calibration dance in order to, well, calibrate the magnetometer onboard a large sUAS. Lastly, a quick video of the first (successful 🙂 ) test flight of a large octocopter sUAS.
Here at William & Mary students are afforded all sorts of awesome opportunities, especially when it comes to working in the labs and gaining experience in undergraduate research. One critical component of the labs is the equipment, and a critical part of being a researcher is understanding the equipment; what better way is there to understand the equipment than to learn how to repair, rebuild, and operate it?
(Below) We helped one particularly talented undergraduate researcher repair and rebuild a tube furnace in one of the labs in the Integrated Science Center. While a tube furnace is little more than a fancy oven, it’s an oven which can go up to over a thousand degrees celsius! This means that in order to repair and rebuild it this particular student learned about high current DC electricity, material science and more.
What’s really important though? She persevered and got it working again (At very bottom)! Good job.
Fix the equipment and now it’s time to science again! 🙂
This past UAV flightclub day (every Friday morning, 8-11 @ Albert-Daly Field), some senior EPAD students working on their research project were gathering data for their autonomous water sampling payload. Shown in the video below, they are testing the flight characteristics of hanging a scaled down Niskin bottle with and without water. Once completed, and scaled up to our much larger UAV, this tool will be able help provide 1.1L water samples, autonomously, from the Chesapeake Bay watershed to scientists at VIMS and elsewhere.
If you’re interested in learning more about UAVs and getting some flight time in, feel free to stop by the field on Friday mornings! #FlightClub
Here’s some recent video of laser cutting stainless steel tabs for a robotics project with Dr. Nelson in Physics. #TribeBuilds
