Design and Testing of a Demonstration Prototype for Lunar/Planetary Surface Landing Research Vehicle (LPSLRV)

This is a student use site for the Utah State University MAE5930 course for orginization and reporting on the design and development of an LPSLRV.

Main>Helicopter Testing>Flight Frame

Here is video of our most recent quad rotor test. This quad rotor is a steel frame similar to a steel frame we built earlier but with much less material to make it lighter. You can see there are load cells, similar to those used to measure the thrust of our jet engine, that will be used to measure the forces of the individual rotors and keep them working together. We are testing our quad rotor in order to develop methods for safe tethered flight so that we can practice flying without actually having the jet engine attached. This is one of the first times we were able to get the craft to begin to lift off but it is very unstable. A steel frame for our quad rotar has since replaced the wood and we flew the quad rotor at Northrop Grumman's engineering week celebration. The craft is currently set up on the test stand where we are studying how to keep it stable. We initially flew this with the carbon wiskers attached but we found that they hindered control of the craft more than they helped so we flew without them. The result was that we were eventually able to fly it at the cost of numerous broken props.

Shown here are some of our flight tests. Once we were able to control the vehicle we mounted a video camera on the frame we borrowed from Chimeara's Pike hybrid rocket.

Helicopter Trade Study

• RID
• Software

Test Stand

• Calibration
• Walkera Chinook
• Iron Cross
• Wooden Cross
• Flight Frame