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What an event-filled flight test!
The best news I could ever report is that the airplane is back safely sitting in one piece. The stories to follow though are worth sitting back and enjoying the ride! I think I'm going to sit and type a full novel for this one...

First things first, we started going through the checklist after arriving to the field. This ensured that we didn't miss any assembly steps or have hardware problems. Well just before the range check, I turned on the radio and noticed the left aileron wasn't moving. Blast! On closer inspection, it was moving slightly and I could grab the aileron and move it nearly at will.

The first thought was the glue holding the servo into the wing was broken, which would have been a day-ender. Not being deterred, I took the wing tip panel off to investigate. Turns out that the aileron pushrod solder joint inside the clevis was broken, allowing the rod to slide in and out of the clevis. Unbelievable! I know for sure last flight test that we grabbed the aileron and held, trying to add some load to the servo and ensure it was happy, so this was the first time seeing this problem.

Well, Adam and Craig made a trip to the local hobby store, fortunately no more than half an hour's round trip. We have replaced the solder-style clevis by using a fully-threaded rod. The new rod feels bomb-proof, so we also replaced the other aileron pushrod just in case. Trimming the ailerons mechanically to match the old trims was uneventful. Range check was great, voltages looked good, time to move on.

Flight number one started around 12:20, a bit late for typical, but must have been right in the middle of the noon-balloon. Adam hooked up in a good thermal right off the bat and proceeded to put the airplane at 1,600ft.

After last flight test, we drafted a document we called "Tuning Version 2.0 Control Laws for Dummies" to aid in our tuning process. We did I think 6 aileron doublets over the next hour, attempting to get data for calculating the aileron effectiveness parameter.

This aircraft has large yaw-roll coupling effects, which the aileron doublet showed dutifully. Craig showed with the AVL model that for a steady axial roll, for each 1deg of aileron movement, 1.2deg of rudder was needed. In the simulator, I tried doublets with the Piccolo Aileron->Rudder mix on and noted that doublets do not include the mixing parameters you set for rudder. Not a giant deal, but it did mean we were destined to see the coupling in our doublets.

Coupling aside, I took the aileron doublet data into Microsoft Excel and figured out my first-pass values for each doublet's aileron effectiveness parameter. We tossed two doublets because we were bumping through thermals that induced roll-effects, masking off the doublet's effects. Averaging the rest of the doublet's results turned up an aileron effectiveness parameter roughly half what the AVL model suggested. From simulation, we knew that an aileron effectiveness that was too large would cause the heading-hunting effects we saw last flight test, so this half discrepancy was somewhat anticipated.

With the new aileron effectiveness, the Piccolo was flying super lots better using the default lateral gain set. We were able to fly boxes and orbits and heading changes and bank angles, all with relative ease. We continued the tuning process enough to help dampen out some fast roll oscillations to ease the aileron servo demands, but that was about it. We did a couple elevator doublets for good measure and later data analysis. In the coming days I'll be looking back at all the aileron doublets for further refinement.

It was about this time that a sherrif's deputy drove out to our field. He was just checking us out; no doubt we were looking suspicious with the trunk open and two cars parked close together. Craig did most of the talking to him, explaining what we were doing and then talking about the hobby of soaring. I think after he saw we weren't dealing drugs (his phrase) he was just curious. He hung around for about 20 minutes watching and asking questions.

After Mr Deputy left, we were ready for a lunch break, so we landed for a flight time of 1.3 hours. Learning our lesson from last flight test, we put the autopilot lipo on charge while we ate Subway and Chick-fil-a (yum!).

Thirty minutes worth of recharging the plane and recharging our own bodies, we launched again. The air was mighty flat and Adam only mananged a 7 minute flight scratching around low for a good thermal. No big deal, we just landed and launched again.

On flight number 3, we were ready to try full ALOFT_rev5 soaring code again. With the aircraft behaving and with my Matlab code having been tweaked since Sunday's flying, we were all hopeful. Immediately after launch, the Skymelody vario started chirping, so we went directly to autopilot and turned soaring mode on. Boy was it good to see the plane immediately latch into soaring mode and start orbiting. Sure enough, the plane linked up with the thermal, centering it dutifully and gaining 2450ft in the next 10 minutes!

At this point the plane was soaring mostly overhead and at good altitudes, so we did some work tuning the speed ring settings. From our 30 September flight, we knew the plane would need to go faster in order to complete the course in a reasonable time and get on record-speed pace.

As we were tuning the speed ring values, the plane was flying in a large box holding pattern waiting for a thermal. Luck had it, the plane's holding pattern was in a giant wide and slow thermal. The 11lb plane picked up another 250m without trying! I think this is the best so far demonstration what being smart about picking a holding location can do for your duration. If the holding pattern box was in any other location, the aircraft would have been steadily dropping altitude; instead, its 11lb was being lifted skyward at zero cost to the "mission" of flying its box.

Anyhow, we peaked out well in visual range still at 4096ft. I personally believe we could have flown the aircraft up even higher. The crystal clear blue sky was a perfect background for seeing the wing, so long as you didn't look away. Adam's eagle eyes were locked on the aircraft.

More speed ring tuning was helpful in burning off altitude as we cruised around various parts of the sky noting airspeeds and altitudes. Back down below 650ft, the soaring mode found its next thermal and started orbiting again, beginning a climb back up to 2600ft. That's about when cops #2 showed up.

These sheriff's deputies drove up, again stating that folks weren't typically in this field and they were making sure we weren't dealing drugs. They were equally as curious as deputy #1, so they hung around and asked all sorts of questions about the hobby. I showed them Bubble Dancer and they were amazed how light the plane was. Fun stuff feeling more comfortable with a cop.

We were watching voltages closely this day, so at 4.75v on the servo pack and altitude back at 3000ft, we decided to call it a day. I relinquished autopilot control after 68.4 minutes of continuous autopilot/soaring flying. Over the flight, soaring left us with 2000ft more altitude than when we turned it on, and it was headed back up when we decided to stop. Adam put the flaps out and started his descent.

I was calling out the servo battery voltage and airspeeds to him, looking to see if the voltage drop from flaps being deployed could be correlated to airspeeds. Voltage was holding around 4.75 to 4.68v. About that time, I saw (and called) the airspeed going 35, 45, 60, 70's, 80's, 90kts! Adam was on the controls gently applying some back pressure on the elevator trying to get out of the dive. He was saying "It's not me, I'm pulling back." I was calling out data from the Command Center screen looking to see if the servo voltage was going lower than 4.68v. The speed came down and the plane leveled back out and we all collectively said "wow what just happened?" Adam used only half flaps the rest of the descent from 1000ft, in case it was a low voltage problem somehow. He made a stellar landing in front of the cops to end the flight and we all breathed easier.

*takes breath again*

So what happened? I checked the telemetry data log and the voltage did dip to 4.68v, but no lower. Adam did nothing wrong by deploying full flaps, since we have done this several times before. The airspeed climb was very steady, though happened quickly. We flew faster than 60mph for 15 seconds and peaked at 100mph. Logically the flaps could not have been deployed to reach these speeds, so why did they retract? Upon landing, we noticed the tip 2" of one flap wiper was binding the flap retraction, so the flap servo would have to pull the surface up mighty hard to deform this plastic wiper.

Theories... the flap servos could have drawn a lot of current and caused a voltage drop in the servo battery and thus retracted due to aero loads since the holding power was no longer available; but we have measured voltage and do not think this happened. The flap servos could have stripped gears; but the servos checked out fine when on the ground. The aero-loads could have over-powered the flap servos at full deflection, causing them to flex back up and making the plane go faster; perhaps, and worth some more servo aero loading calculations. The manual override somehow could have mis-functioned and given control to the backup controller; but the plane is speed-stable and would have pulled up sharply being trimmed for a lower airspeed. Other theories are under testing too... feel free to suggest if you have alternates.

At any rate, I'm super happy the plane is in one piece after an eventful day! This was quite an up & down day, logging 2.7hours in the air and 1.3hours on autopilot. I am quite happy at the successes and will be working to figure out some of the other quirks from the day. I think I may take a few days off to enjoy spring break and gather my senses...

Thanks for reading!
Dan

Hello all,

Sunday was a remarkable day for flying! 5hours of air-time today, which is almost a third of the entire air-time on this airframe!!! We logged 5 flights total, so that's an average of an hour a flight. Our best flight was 2.5hrs, with the other flights being 86min, 34min, 25min, and 3min. Unbelievable!

The good news for flying this long is that I was able to get all the tuning time I wanted. I kept referring back to the "Tuning Control Laws 2.0" document and boiling down tests trying to tweak each gain individually, though many still seemed coupled. Adam would call over "hey Dan, you have some altitude if you want to tune" and I would echo, "okay, I am going to tweak x gain; let me know if it's still doing x." Several times I would burn off half or more of Adam's altitude in tuning, and he was a terrific sport working from a tough place to regain the altitude starting from very low. I would watch the XC competition scene in the future because Adam is getting quite skilled at the mighty SBXC!

From the tuning, we came up with a few sets of gains that would do specific maneuvers acceptably. For example, we could fly orbits by tweaking a couple values, but when sending it back to a standard box the plane would completely over-turn and look like a lost dog. Or, we could get the plane tuned to fly an acceptable straight-line on a standard rectangle pattern, but it would blow the turns and have a difficult time of recapturing the headings. I guess the end result is, even after all the tuning time, we're only closer, not done with tuning.

Adam and I drafted up a "Tuning Control Laws 2.0 for Dummies" document last night on the drive back from the field. We tried to separate the individual gains for lateral control into an order and a set of tests that would allow tuning only ONE value at a time. We also discussed what each gain really meant, several times spending a good while getting our way of saying it to match the other person's, after realizing we were saying the same thing. This was a good process and certainly should aid in examining the flight maneuvers to evaluate what the different gains were making the aircraft do differently.

In similar news, the first flight of the day was with the stock AVL (Athena Vortex Lattice) model that Craig and I collaborated on. For some background, the AVL model was created from geometry measurements of the aircraft, mass measurements of the aircraft pieces, and an inertia swing to get the fuselage inertias specifically. This model was massaged over two solid days of work late last week into working happily with the Cloud Cap simulator. The simulator can estimate items such as aileron effectiveness parameter from the simulator model, which draws the aero coefficients from the AVL model. The output - called Fixed Wing Gen 2 - fills out the Vehicle Parameters tab and supposedly is all the tuning necessary for the version 2 controller. Effectively these parameters set ALL the inner-loop gains.

Well the AVL model, which seemed to fly successfully on windy Saturday, did not perform quite up to par on a calm day with more time to show its quirks. We did see acceptable flight characteristics, but noted such problems as s-turns while trying to hold a heading. This is where the tuning started on Sunday.

Once in a while, we got a set of gains pulled together that seemed to be pretty close. During two of these times, I decided to try ALOFT_rev5 code just to see if soaring was behaving correctly with version 2. Immediately it was clear I have made a couple changes flying on simulator data that did not work in real-life conditions. Also, the waypoint uploading wasn't working as I anticipated, so the vehicle kept trying to fly through the center of the orbit instead of re-capturing the orbit itself. These are certainly fixable, but will take some time in the lab rather than scrapping together a field-patch. Good that it's mostly working; just needs tweaking for the new version 2 load.

On a side note, after flying 2.5hrs, we ran the autopilot battery pretty dry. The limit for a 3s lipo is 3.0v per cell. Well now I have a very pretty view of the discharge curve for a lipo and can say conclusively that from 10v to 9v takes approximately 8.8 minutes. Cloud Cap does not (as far as I have been told) support adding your own voltage warning level, so I was checking the AP battery regularly. But, I did not expect the discharge curve to roll off quite as quickly. I caught the voltage problem as it crossed 9.0v and relayed to Adam to put the airplane on the ground quickly. The full-70deg flap position is extremely effective for bleeding off excess energy and Adam dropped ~1500ft and the AP switch was turned off in under a couple minutes from the first low voltage signs. The battery seems okay this morning, but more care will have to be taken to avoid hurting the lipo in the future. Alternately, this stands to argue for a larger capacity autopilot battery for longer run-times. We charged the AP battery over lunchtime even...

What else is there to say? I really wish I could get through tuning and move on to the fun stuff again. Lesson learned: you can never check the battery voltages of your system often enough. Flying is a lot of fun on good days :-)

I have a lot of work to do today and tomorrow in post-flight analysis preparing for how to continue tuning on the next flight Wednesday. I have Craig working on checking over the AVL model and looking at the doublet data to figure out aileron effectiveness parameter. Adam needs a day off to deal with real-life. I'm going to do post-flight analysis to figure out what the tuning did for us and try to figure out which gains worked well.

I uploaded pictures in the 3-2-08 gallery.

We decided late Thursday to pass up flying Friday for the calmer winds Saturday ... well it turned out to be windier, steady 10-15mph gusting to 25mph. Ouch.

I'm terrifically glad nobody else came out to the flying field today ... it was pretty windy and miserable. Adam put four flights on the SBXC despite the gusts and looked like he was fighting pretty hard on the landings. His comment was that lift was good when you went through the small pocket. For instance, we got a really big bump over the edge of the trees, either from ridge lift or some thermal popping off. It was way too small though and moving downwind fast from what Adam reported. We managed 300ft gain as our best climb today, topping out at a measly 850ft max altitude.

We were mostly planning to tune the autopilot, which was probably not the best item to have on the list for a windy day. We were grounded early with some very odd right aileron servo issues which were duplicable for a while and then vanished. We worked on the wiring a while and found one single strand of shielding that was poking all the way through the servo insulation ... but it was on a channel that wasn't seeing issues! We eventually had gone through enough items that we had to call it fixed and move on. I'll probably post a better report of what happened when I finish reading our novel of a field flight log written today. We were being super thorough. No occurrences of the aileron issue yet to report.

Anyhow, the big news is that the autopilot is back online. We were able to get through tuning the heading control today and demonstrated flying 1/2 of a box (before running out of safe altitude). The airspeed control looked acceptable in the wind, but tomorrow's calm conditions should really help look more into this. Overall, I'm quite happy with the success despite the extremely crummy weather conditions!

Wish I remembered to take some pictures today, all I have now is close-ups of the wiring issues and they are pretty boring to share...

More flying this week. Stay tuned!
Dan

Spring break is next week! No, I'm not headed to the Carribean, nor to Key Largo; nope, I'm headed back out to Wilson for some intensive test flying!

The plan is to start Friday and get at least four test flight days over the next week and change. The goal is to get version 2 controller fully tuned up, ready to tackle soaring yet again. Version 2 has been stubborn to tune over the past couple flying days, so I've been updating the simulation model, measuring moments of inertia, and doing a lot of simulated flying all in an attempt to be better prepared for tuning.

I also have been making some really neat updates to the Thermal ID algorithms. They are now also written in a paper for the AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control conference. Hopefully the paper will be accepted and I can post it here! It pretty much spills all the beans about how this stuff works. Stand-by for more news.

Well, I have to get back to working on the AVL simulation model, so short post, but hopefully you enjoyed the random update!

Fingers crossed for good air this upcoming week!!!

ALOFT is back at it again. This time, we were again trying to tune v2.0.4 software on the Piccolo. The end result, after an hour of flying time, the tuning is still not done. Glider air-time is expensive! An entire day of testing for an hour??

Joking aside, I was pretty under the weather with a cold, so being out at the field wasn't the most fun. We were hoping to fly on Saturday, but my cold got much worse about 3am Saturday morning, so I cancelled. I did enjoy using the new ground-station I've been working on this past week. Any time you can take 4 boxes and replace them with one, life is good.

What about the flying you ask? Good question. We had a very crummy time finding thermals, so we ended up launching a total of 14 times. Most flights were around 2-5 minutes with one flight at 17 minutes. It wasn't a good day for thermal activity. The calm day did give us time to tune the autopilot a bit though.

I have started climbing the relatively uncharted territory of version 2 tuning. There aren't teriffic procedures outlined yet as far as I can find, so we ended up making up our own procedure. The CCT guys recommend "make your simulation model, then turn all the loops on and see what happens. It will probably be close." Well, something must be wrong with my simulation file or the default v2 gains aren't good for my glider, one of the two. The glider had pretty ugly roll oscillations as it tried to track to a waypoint. After a couple times of this, we decided to turn off all the control loops except airspeed and bank angle control (good idea Craig). This let us see that the aileron effectiveness parameter was reasonable and the plane would hold 0, 15, -15deg bank angles okay. We tweaked the parameter slightly and decided it was acceptable. Later on, we would wish we spent more time doing larger bank angles.

Next came turning on heading control with bank angle loop set to auto. We quickly found out that the heading control was causing the ugly behavior from before. Deciding to tweak the default gains, we eventually got the plane to enjoy nice heading turns, albeit with a bit of heading oscillations.

Turning all the control loops back on and tracking a waypoint, we did not have good success. The first time when the vehicle was pointed straight on the path, the plane did okay, but opening up the max bank angle limit from 20deg back to 30deg, we started seeing roll excursions upwards of 45deg. Craig and I suspect now that the first step of tuning the bank angle control for higher bank angles may be the root problem. After clearing the higher bank angle behavior, we can resume climbing back up the tuning ladder.

So, despite a beautiful day for tuning, we came out mostly empty handed. I feel like I confirmed the simulation file pretty well, so it looks like it's just going to take some more tuning days to get the plane happier. Bummer. Maybe flying on this upcoming Friday will be an option again?

I think I'm wishing I had an electric motor on this plane, at least for tuning. Maybe an electric motor pod on top would be doable! Get up to altitude, do some tuning, then take the bugger off and become a glider again. Hm.

More news after next flight date. The summer is approaching all too rapidly!

See test flight pictures at:
http://goosetech.homelinux.com/soaring/album.php?albumid=17

Lessons learned from the version 1 SBXC, I have decided to go with the Windex for version 2. The SBXC is quite a performer, but is not very self-contained since it needs a winch to launch it and requires a relatively nice day to fly. Now moving to the Windex, the whole system is self-contained (meaning powered with an electric motor for winch-less operation) and will allow flying on crummy days to really exercise the soaring algorithm. The Windex may seem like a somewhat odd choice since it was meant for glider aerobatics, but it offers a large fuselage volume with a very stout wing (read "payload capacity"). This will push more emphasis onto being efficient using thermals since the airplane is not optimum for soaring.

News will be slow about the progress on the Windex. I'm still planning to take the SBXC flying ALOFT code to a competition and get some real-world comparisons of the algorithms ... this is less for competition and more for "wow, it can/can't keep up with the real guys!" Getting ready for this graduation exercise and getting papers and presentations ready is definitely going to take precedence.

For now, enjoy the pictures! Click the "large" picture for one that does not have distorted colors ... something about the thumbnail maker keeps corrupting the colors.
http://goosetech.homelinux.com/soaring/album.php?albumid=16

I'm back at it! This was the first flight test since the hugely successful Cross-Country on 9-30-07.

To note, I have changed a LOT of stuff since the last flight. I upgraded to a Piccolo II, changed out ground stations, upgraded the ground station laptop, moved to version 2.0.4 controller code, added the Wstech variometer, added an old Cloud Cap Tech PTU Node, and updated some wiring for better RFI shielding. Whew!

Starting with what worked.... the new grounded shielding worked well. We were able to range check out to 154 paces while blasting full 1 watt autopilot transmit power on the airplane. This is a considerable improvement to before. The new GCS and laptop worked wonderfully, though my inverter complained when plugging both in at once. Thank goodness for an awesome laptop battery! The Wstech vario performed like a charm, chirping away in lift (I wish I could get it to go to a solid tone while sitting on the table though). No news yet on how the analog to digital recording of it went yet (the setting may not have been saved correctly, DOH). The PTU node flashed some LED's and I still have to see if I can pull out the data. The new PCC worked well also, just keeping me on top of the learning curve.

Now what didn't work.... I flew version 2.0.4 code on a Senior Telemaster with another local group and with the vehicle parameters from the simulator, the aircraft flew great out of the box. However with the SBXC, I think I need to go double check my configuration file and redo my servo calibrations. The plane held airspeed just fine, but with a relatively stiff wind, the plane couldn't stay turned heading to an upwind waypoint. I have a few ideas what to check before next flight. It's a rough feeling going from such a success to not even being able to fly a straight line... soon I'll get 'er back right.

I even did a little bit of flying on this test day. Normally I let Adam do all the flying because that's what he's good at and it really helps to have an expert while I'm busy worrying about computer stuff. This flight Adam had the plane way up around 1500ft, so I asked to fly and spent some time on the sticks learning to fly such a large high-performance glider. I was surprised how much effort it took to keep the wings level; being used to RES gliders with a lot of polyhedral, I rarely worry about coordinating ailerons and rudder in turns. I was also surprised how much aileron it took to initiate a turn. Anyhow, I did manage to core two nice thermals and ride up several hundred feet, so I must have adapted pretty quickly ;-) I even did my first landing with the SBXC, quite uneventfully. Good to have some hands-on experience with it finally.

So what's next you ask? Well, figure out how to get the version 2 controller to fly the airplane is top priority. Once that's working again, I can turn to the ALOFT code and see if any of my code changes broke the previously working soaring algorithms. Beyond that, well I already have a plate-full with the last two sentences :-)

Stay tuned for more updates. I'm hoping to get two more test days in the next three weeks, so I should have more news relatively soon. Thanks for reading!

Happy Holidays to everyone! It's about time I posted another update.

For my vacation time between fall and spring semesters, I finally was able to spend some time working on soaring...

In the hardware arena, I was able to acquire two old Cloud Cap Tech PTU Nodes (measuring pressure, temperature, and humidity). It will allow measuring what, if any, changes in atmospheric conditions exist inside a thermal. Perhaps we can find how warm a thermal really is, or perhaps figure out if a thermal carries surface humidity to the skies. This data may hopefully lead to ideas to find thermals at a greater distance than is currently possible. I'm sure this data exists somewhere, but maybe there is something of new relevance to auto-soaring that was missed before.

I was also able to hook up the Wstech vario to the Piccolo and read it with the ADC lines on the Piccolo II daughter board. So far the calibration has turned out to be more of a challenge than actually reading from the hardware ... but if I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be research. Anyhow, the Wstech is at least giving me hope for a way to confirm the vario I wrote for the Piccolo sensors and potentially be a welcome replacement for currently noisy data.

Moving over to pure software, the thermal model integration hasn't made any progress since I reported last, but several new improvements have crept into the latest ALOFT_rev5 (rev4 never flew).

One of our major complaints from the 9/30/07 flight was that the plane flew too slowly and needed more autonomy. So, courtesy of Paul MacCready, ALOFT now sports a speed ring, albeit made of 1's and 0's. Ironically, the 9/30/07 flight carried the ring, but it was just turned off. Now it's in full-swing and ready to go fly. There is certainly still some tuning to be done, but the learning curve is at least started. This should let the plane get more aggressive at the higher altitudes especially.

A bonus I mentioned about switching to the new Piccolo version 2 controller is to gain faster rate telemetry. After more exhaustive testing, I have concluded to have a stable 2Hz update rate in SWIL simulation. Most of my code's time is spent plotting and reading from the serial port. I tried to thread Matlab by having multiple instances communicate to no avail. For now I'll live with 2Hz since the algorithm appears to work just fine at 1Hz. With live real-time testing I am seeing somewhat intermittent performance around 1Hz anyway ... more time will be spent here in the near future.

Well that's it for now. I'm hoping for a test flight in late January to start out the new year right. The whole spring semester's goal is to make it to a major XC competition and actually be competitive, so you should see more flight testing as I build up the hours needed to scare out the software bugs.

Much to the dismay of my MIMO homework, I figured out how to get thermals in the Piccolo simulator ... okay I have no idea of the simulator turbulence model at this point, but if you set x & y winds to zero with a 250m width, then set z width to 1500m and z-magnitude to 600m/s, you can get a steady 1.75m/s thermal climb-rate in the Piccolo simulator! The "thermals" are relatively well-behaved and well-shaped, so my soaring algorithms have very little difficulty finding them. Fun to watch the plane soaring again.

I should mention, I didn't realize the full-potential of flight simulation. A controls guru was pushing me toward writing a simulator at one point and I somewhat shrugged it off as "why re-invent when I'm already working with flight data?" Well, sitting in the comfort of my warm apartment running the software in the loop sim (SWIL), I have been able to test out nearly all of the Piccolo IO functions and debug them without ever lifting a finger. This ability to emulate a Piccolo flying around the cross-country course over and over again has really helped familiarize me with the behavior of the algorithms. I have spent many more hours flying the simulator than I have actual flight data ... and my car's gas bill is a lot nicer this way too!

So that was quite a little update, but I'm proud that I now have a soaring simulation. I hope to talk with the Cloud Cap folks about implementing a more accurate updraft model so I can do more meaningful thermal capturing tests.

The AIAA presentation also went well yesterday. Good questions and someone made the joke "Why don't you have your adviser and committee here? You pretty much went through a masters' defense already." I think I'm going to make some big improvements over the upcoming Christmas holiday and start writing...

After a successful presentation to the Triangle Amateur Robotics club on November 1st, I will also be presenting to the NC State University chapter of AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) on Tuesday, November 13th in Broughton room 3216. The presentation is open to the public, so if you're in the area, feel free to come on by!

I have attached the AIAA flyer.