Hello everyone, my name is Hayden Foote and I’m a rising Senior at Telluride High School.
This summer I am working at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV). The lab is primarily concerned with the development and testing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), which are composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), more commonly known as drones, and their control systems. My mentor is James Mack, a UAS engineer and RECUV’s pilot.
My mentor James Mack (left) and Will (right), one of the undergrads who works at RECUV, working on the Tempest before flight.
Currently, I am with a team of RECUV engineers and professors in Lubbock, TX, working with a team from Texas Tech University to test a command and control system for UAVs that will eventually be implemented to gain atmospheric data from within supercells (severe tornado-producing thunderstorms). We are flying a Tempest UAV out of Reese Airfield, a retired Air Force base now used by the National Wind Institute at Texas Tech. Over the past week, the team has focused on making sure all of the pieces of the system are working together. The entire UAS consists of two Doppler radar trucks that analyze the wind environment around the aircraft, systems to figure out where the aircraft needs to fly to obtain the needed atmosphere samples, and the aircraft itself, which can be run on an autopilot.
My role with the team is to document the tests. I’ve been taking a load of pictures and am starting to write short “field notes” for RECUV’s blog. Eventually, I will put together a video showcasing the better photos and videos that I’ve taken so that RECUV has a way to show off what we have accomplished on deployment. I”ve also been helping with some of the fight crew’s hardware where they trust me to do so.
Will launching the Tempest while James flies
Next week, we will begin full testing of the whole UAS to see how much of it can be automated. After this, we will return to Boulder and I will spend the rest of July working at CU in RECUV’s lab. For anyone interested, the center’s website can be found here: http://www.colorado.edu/
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