Today was a peacefully productive day. I sat on the terrace of the Hunt library all morning, worked away at my OpenVSP project, read some books, and admired the many birds. I have completed the rough models of my two airplane models: Cessna 210 and Atlantis OV-104. Below is a rough model of the Atlantis OV-104. I will be finalizing the models and creating my presentation tomorrow.
Later in the day, I met up with a Ph.D. student for a quick tour of his drone lab. The lab was filled with a wide variety of drones, ranging from hand-made to professional, from wood and Styrofoam to metal. It was really cool seeing just some of many possible aircraft models all displayed in one room. His research mainly focused on creating an algorithm via Matlab for designing, developing, and testing UAS flight paths. Other students in his lab worked on autonomous drones and creating an unmanned batterie changing station for quadcopters to allow for longer travel distances without increasing batteries size. On a side note, during the tour, I learned that you can “boil” Styrofoam to return it to its original shape after a crash and that a nice way to cut Styrofoam is by using a hot wire.