I have been a member of Rice Eclipse, Rice University's competition rocket club, since my
freshman year. In 2023, I became a team lead.
Many of Eclipse's rockets end up in inconvenient places after launching due to winds and other
random
variables. Sometimes, our creations end up in private property, or in places hard to travel to.
(A
couple years back, one of our competition rockets landed in a different state than it was
launched in!)
To solve this problem, I led a team of 10 Rice engineering students to develop a
fully-integrated
automatic recovery system for a payload inside a hobby rocket launched to 3,000 feet. The
mechanism
consisted of a paraglider-shaped stunt kite and a responsive system controlling two linear
actuators,
which would pull on either side of the kite, effectively steering the machine.
This task involved creating a 3D design for the rocket using SolidWorks, consulting aerospace experts associated with my university, programming a raspberry pi, working with IMU and GPS sensor data, and writing lots of python code.
A critical problem our team faced was a difficulty in testing our system. Launching
rockets
requires traveling to a launch site and money for the engines, which we quickly realized
was
unsustainable and highly inconvenient. We tried dropping the payload off of the Rice
University Football Stadium, but needed more height to get any useful data.
So, we designed a system to attach the payload to a drone, fly it to our desired height,
and
drop it.
This system involved a simple locking pin system, where we attached a drone to a tube,
and
placed the payload inside, held in place by a linear actuator with its leg extended
through
a hole in the tube. The drone would carry the whole system into the air, and at a
certain
height (500ft), a signal was sent to the linear actuator making it contract, causing the
payload to fall out of the tube. Finally, the kite and servo system would guide the
payload
back down to the ground.
After testing our system in April 2024, we got some successful readings from the drone test system,
which indicate our payload was able to navigate itself in the correct direction!
This project was presented to represent Rice Eclipse at the 2024 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase
at the Ion District in Houston. Watch the video to see more!