Simon Lovely: Aerospace Engineering and Unmanned Aerial Systems: Week One

This week for my first week of my Internship, I went to the Oklahoma State University Research Institute to visit Dr. Jamey Jacob and other fellow interns that I would be working with throughout the summer. There are a total of seven interns (including me) that are working this summer for Dr. Jacob, A professor at OSU for Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.

Throughout the first week, we had a few projects we were assigned to. One of which was building a plane which could carry a Radiosonde. The Radiosonde is a device typically used when people send up weather balloons. Dr. Jacob wanted us to attempt to build a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) which could potentially carry the Radiosonde. Our first attempt didn’t go very well as the first aircraft we made wasn’t too bad as it had everything it needed to fly, but it was significantly heavy which would be a big contributing factor to making it fly. We haven’t tested the aircraft yet to see if it would really fly under its own power or not, but we have hand thrown it without power a couple times.

One other project that Dr. Jacob asked us to do was go to Alamosa with him and a team of UAV Certified flyers to go research winds and other factors coming off of one of the nearby peaks. George and I plan on going there for the last part of our internship. The program is through a company called CloudMap which every year has a few universities come and bring their UAVs down to a certain spot and do some research. CloudMap is a company that uses only UAVs to carry out research and is focused on developing them for future use of anything a customer might want.

Dr. Jacob also assigned all of us a big project to make a drone which would capture dolphin samples blown out of their blowhole to be brought back to use for research. There was one already for whales but there isn’t one yet for dolphins, which is our big task for the next few weeks.

The following photos are of fabricating the UAV and a picture of all of us.

The Interns from left to right are: Simon, Stetsen, George, Meghana, PJ and Alex. Another intern was missing at the time of this photo which was Timmy.

The plane on the far left was the one that all of us built in that week to hold the Radiosonde. We have yet to test it. The aircraft in the middle was one that the interns made the previous week which we were not here for. Then the aircraft in the back is one that we are going to use to capture the dolphin DNA to bring back to a lab.

When I wasn’t working, We would go to the pool, go to the game room for some fun or kick back at the apartment and enjoy a video or movie. We would always have out food at the apartment here which would be tacos, pizza or pasta.

Overall, My first week here was very fun with some engineering and fun people around. I am very excited for the second week in which we would get more into making a UAV to capture dolphin DNA.