Sooner Off-Road Team Has Their Most Successful Year

Since 2010, Sooner Off-Road has engineered a vehicle at the University of Oklahoma. Every year they design, manufacture, and compete with a Baja SAE vehicle. Baja SAE consists of three competitions that simulate real-world engineering projects and their related challenges. Engineering students are given a mission to design and build a single-seat, all-terrain, sporting vehicle that performs well with speed, handling, ride, and ruggedness over rough terrain and off-road conditions. This year the team was led by co-captains Ben Basden and Advika Kamatar and their advisor Dr. Chris Dalton to their most successful year ever!

The Sooner Off-Road team was able to compete in three events this year. One in-person event and, because of Covid-19, one event that took place virtually. In these events the team competed against teams from across the US as well as universities from around the world.

In the virtual competition, the team received 9th place in design presentation, 3rd in the business presentation, and 1st place in the cost presentation. Each of those results is the best the Sooner Off-Road team has ever done in the respective events. Overall, they ended up in 7th place, which is a fantastic result for the team!

For the in-person competition, they achieved 12th in maneuverability, 9th in hill climb, 3rd in suspension, and 2nd in acceleration.  Out of 45 teams who attempted the suspension course, they were one of only three teams to actually complete it. Amazingly, this is the best the Sooner Off-Road team has ever done in those events as well!

We are very proud of the Sooner Off-Road team and congratulate them for their tremendous success!

For more information about the Sooner Off-Road team, check out their Facebook page and follow them on Instagram.

 

 

 

 

 

Undergraduate Rocket Research Group has Successful Launch

The University of Oklahoma’s Undergraduate Rocket Research group launched a rocket in Argonia, Kansas on March 10th, 2019. Dr. Thomas Hays and his students are proud of the results.

The rocket had a maximum speed of Mach 1.15 and weighed 105 pounds. The students involved in the launch were Kaley Hassell, Jarod Manning, Alex Speed, and Scott Tesser. Congratulations on your successful launch!

Click here to watch the video of the rocket.

Dr. Imraan Faruque Presents Seminar over Current Research

Imraan Faruque, Ph.D., gave a presentation on Monday, March 25, 2019 on how biologically-driven flight control strategies can inform unmanned aerial vehicle swarms. Dr. Faruque is an assistant professor for the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at OSU.

Abstract: This seminar introduces a framework for deriving feedback design principles that can enable insect-based flight control approaches on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and engineered extensions to groups of UAS. The seminar begins by establishing flight dynamics models of dipteran flapping wing insects, combining automated high-speed videography measurements of freely flying insects, experimental aerodynamics results, rigid body dynamics, and system identification techniques to distill high fidelity flight dynamics models into computationally-tractable models applicable to flight control analysis.  Methods to extract models of the closed loop controllers implemented on insects from free flight trajectories are discussed.  Linear matrix inequalities are applied to interpret the controllers into design principles that can translate the extracted controllers into those appropriate for engineered vehicles, and improvements in experimental techniques to quantify multi-agent aerial insect behaviors.  Control-theoretic definitions of reachability are applied to the aerodynamic mechanisms involved in insect-scale flight control and gust response, leading to a theoretic framework for the gust response properties of closed-loop flight control and the engineered design of gust-aware flight controllers.

Biography: Imraan Faruque’s research interests include reduced-order models of complex systems, biologically inspired locomotion and control systems, unmanned aerial systems, and flight dynamics and control.  Dr. Faruque’s specialization is in dynamic models of flying insect feedback, and in reduced order flight dynamics models that can concisely capture the dynamic properties of insect flight control, where his work has led to over 40 publications, including numerous best paper awards and patents. Dr. Faruque is currently an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, with an appointment as Assistant Research Professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Aerospace Engineering.  He is an honors alumnus of Virginia Tech, and received his MS (2010) and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 2011 from the University of Maryland. He previously held research positions at the Army Research Lab, the Air Force Research Lab, and at General Electric Aircraft Engines.