Honeywell Urban Air Mobility

By Henrik Hoffmann

Hi, I am Henrik Hoffmann a rising Aerospace Engineering senior, and during my junior year I had the privilege to work on the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) project with Embry-Riddle’s Undergraduate Research Institute (URI), which was sponsored by Honeywell Aerospace for the fall and spring semester. Through the support of the URI, Dr. Johann Dorfling, and with the support of Honeywell engineers, UAMs flight testing and data analysis started at the end of our summer internship and is planned to finish during the 2020 fall semester.

The purpose of this project for my junior school year and summer internship was to characterize the power requirements, climb profile, and descent profile capabilities of various simulated UAMs. I also helped define required UAM flight capabilities, most efficient flight paths, and UAM limitations. Multiple configurations and concepts of UAM aircraft are being proposed, designed, and built by a variety of companies such as Airbus, Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk, Lilium, Terrafugia, Uber Air, VA-1X and Volocopter. Concepts for these UAMs include multirotor, fixed wing, and rotating rotor wing designs.

Me (third from right) with the rest of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University UAM Team after presenting to the Honeywell representatives.

To join this project, our team had to submit a resume and letter of recommendation to Honeywell to get an interview. Our team consists of six Embry-Riddle students, our mentor Dr. Dorfling, as well as multiple Honeywell engineers. The major job of our first semester was to submit a survey to Honeywell that included a design of our drone, flight test plans, wind tunnel test plans, and a characterization of our drone compared to previous UAM designs. During the second semester we built our UAM, and 3-D printed a compartment designed to better help predict and characterize UAMs similar to ours.

Due to Covid-19, our project was not finished over the school year and got pushed into our summer internship. As a result, our internship was conducted virtually, and our project’s progress was slowed. But over the summer, small test flights took place along with error analysis, and I worked with Honeywell Aerospace’s Electrical Power Group in Torrance, California on the Next Generation Jammer Program (NGJ). My work with the NGJ tested mid band as well as low band performance calculation of the Ram Air Turbines Generation (RATG).

Over this summer of 2020, Bell conducted the first customer flight test of UAM designs our team worked on, and I can see where the research my team and I are doing will be implemented in the future. Our team’s UAM project will continue over the 20/21 school year and will include our first test flight. That will allow us to analyze the data to predict the optimal flight takeoff and landing paths for our UAM design. The upcoming Honeywell UAM Team will include a mix of returning team members as well as new juniors to finish off the project. Once our project is finished up the same process will be restarted with another UAM type, and could include multirotor, fixed wing, or rotating rotor designs.

Our visit to the Honeywell location in Deer Valley, Ariz.

The experiences I gained with my team and during my summer internship has been amazing. Working on this project has allowed me to apply what I have learned from the classroom and to see how our work will change transportation around the world. Our internship has also allowed me to experience Honeywell’s corporate environment and further my understanding of UAM. I have enjoyed this project and would highly recommend this opportunity to anyone!

John Marbut: Mapping the Ecuadorian Rainforest with UAS in Study Abroad

John Marbut is a guest blogger on a study abroad program through UAS7 which is a full-year, full tuition program in Germany. In the fall students take classes at the University of Applied Sciences and in the spring participate in an internship in a lab or institution with hands on work on a project.

Starting from the left in the lower row its: Severin Mainz, Niclas Purger, Benjamin Bachmeier. The second row from the left is myself, I don't know the name of the two tribe members, then Mascha Kauka, Domingo (President of Shartamensa), Dr. Siebold, and Dr. Krzystek. In the last row is Fabian Braun, Christoph Oberndorfer, and Jonas Wilhelm.

Starting from the left in the lower row its: Severin Mainz, Niclas Purger, Benjamin Bachmeier. The second row from the left is myself, I don’t know the name of the two tribe members, then Mascha Kauka, Domingo (President of Shartamensa), Dr. Siebold, and Dr. Krzystek. In the last row is Fabian Braun, Christoph Oberndorfer, and Jonas Wilhelm.

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to join a research team and senior thesis project at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, the major focus for the project was mapping the Ecuadorian rainforest. The group was actually invited to do the mapping through their partnership with Amazonica who works with the tribes to help improve their quality of life by improving education and providing medical supplies. The planned project required us to modify the UAV/Drone (it can fly autonomously or via remote control) from the last AUVSI competition. We needed to be able to get high resolution photos of the rainforest in order to be able to generate a 3-D map of the area we flew over, so the team installed a new payload containing more batteries, room for the camera, and an infrared trigger to start the camera. The antenna used to update the information about the drone’s had a range of about 5 miles, however the autopilot could fly without making contact with the homebase and the drone had a maximum flight time of just over an hour. The picture above is from our last flight in Shartamensa, home to some of the Achuar tribe.

We left for Ecuador in early November, leaving early in the morning we took a fifteen hour flight from Munich to Quito where we met with our guide Mascha Kauka.

Shartamensa

Shartamensa

After another day of traveling we finally made it to Shartamensa. We had chosen November because it is the dry season for the region that we were mapping. We were able to use the village’s empty hospital as a staging area for the assembly, it took a day to get everything setup. The second day in Shartamensa we started to doing test flights, we found that after about 2pm the rainstorms roll in which makes flying impossible. The third day I joined the Geoinformatics team on a trek into the rainforest to the big tree which stood at about 60 meters tall. RainforestWe pushed through a swamp and had to hack through the underbrush to get there but the tree was absolutely incredible to see. The tree was about the size of a car and towered well above the normal canopy. The Geoinformatics laid out a gps points that made the mapping for the area accurate down to a few inches. We managed to get back to the village just before sun down and prepped for our second trip the following day.

Sacred waterfall

Image by Christoph Oberndorfer, a student at Hochschule München

 On the second day of exploration we left quite a bit earlier and so we actually had lunch at a temporary camp that was set up just off the river. The flights went really well, we only had a couple of hard landings but the damage wasn’t too bad. The stay was actually incredible pleasant, we got to see a lot of the Achuar culture, including a lunch on the river, demonstration of their formal greetings, and we got to try a lot of local food. Some of the more unique food and drink was cauim (a traditional type of beer) and roasted grubs. We got to take a trip to a sacred waterfall which is visited anytime the village is struggling. They believe that washing your hands in the waterfall can cleanse your soul. On our last day we spent time with some of the locals playing volleyball and soccer and participated in a cultural exchange between the team and the village. Soccer in the villageAfter the week in the Amazon half of the team returned to Pujo while the second half remained in the Amazon to track down the aircraft after a failure occurred in the autopilot causing the UAV to go down 2 kilometers into the rainforest. Those of us who went back stayed in a city called Baños which is well known for its volcanic hot springs. We spent a day in Baños and waited for the other half of the group to join us before heading to the hot springs. We actually got the opportunity to see a small eruption as we headed away from Baños. We wrapped up the trip with a few days in Quito checking out the Equator, the Equator park, the crater, and the Basilica. The city was beautiful and I would love to go back. My understanding is that team might be going back map the Galapagos, and I encourage anyone who is going to Munich next year to try and join the team.

 -John Marbut

Sunset

Watch Student UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) Club

In today’s video blog, Colton gives you a glimpse into one of the most popular on-campus attractions for Riddle students… The UAS club!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEU0xwbdHu0&feature=youtu.be

 

For more information, comment below to get in contact with someone!

Stay tuned for more exciting videos about life at Embry Riddle and its surroundings.

Embry’s Biggest Surprise — The Tight-Knit Community

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Ever since I was a kid, I had a passion for anything aviation. My aunt was in the Navy and my grandpa was a private pilot with a V-Tail Bonanza. I loved to be surrounded by people who shared the same passion as I had. When coming to Embry-Riddle, I knew I would be surrounded by a community of students and faculty who also loved aviation (since it is an aeronautical university), but I had no idea how tight-knit that community would be. Embry-Riddle is just a large family, with all its members having one common passion and drive: aviation. Not only is everyone pursuing a career in a similar field, but many also share the same extracurricular interests. By the third day of orientation, my suitemates and I built an airplane out of a broken printer we found in the dumpster (no we weren’t dumpster diving) and proceeded to launch it off our third story balcony.

My new video ROP project5_edited-1

Silly as it seems, the building and launching of the ‘printer plane’ started the formation of a strong bond between my suitemates and I, and made life long memories before school had even started! And the adventures aren’t limited to gliders created from old electronics; within two weeks I had built friendships with several other guys who shared my love for remote control aircraft. Since then, we have built combat airplanes, built and flown multirotors such as hexacopters and tricopters, have had plenty of crashes, and have made tons of memories.

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It’s that sense of family that surprised me most about Embry-Riddle, and I think it’s a unique community you won’t find at any other university

If you’re interested in seeing the “Printer Pelican 1”, you can watch the video I made at this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA1GviCfwlw

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