University of Michigan wins top prize in Vertical Flight Society’s Design-Build-Vertical-Flight student competition

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan has won the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety’s inau­gur­al Design-Build-Ver­ti­cal Flight com­pe­ti­tion, which was cre­at­ed to help pre­pare the next gen­er­a­tion of engi­neers and lead­ers for the emerg­ing eVTOL and advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) mar­kets.

A total of sev­en aca­d­e­m­ic teams sub­mit­ted entries after being asked to build a gen­er­al air­craft with require­ments restrict­ed to the unmanned air­craft sys­tem (UAS) Group 1, which lim­it­ed the max­i­mum take-off weight to no more than 20lb (9.1kg).

Although restric­tions due to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic forced the can­cel­la­tion of the fly-off por­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion, each team sub­mit­ted a final tech­ni­cal report and made a vir­tu­al pre­sen­ta­tion of their design and find­ings to a pan­el of judges from April 15th-16th.

For win­ning the com­pe­ti­tion, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan was award­ed $2,000. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land came sec­ond and was award­ed $1,000, while Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty received $500 for fin­ish­ing in third place.

Hon­ourable men­tions from the judges were also giv­en to McGill Uni­ver­si­ty in Mon­tre­al for ‘Best Draw­ing Pack­age’, and Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty for ‘Most Cre­ative’. Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty were men­tioned in ‘Best Com­pu­ta­tion­al Sim­u­la­tion and Vaughn Col­lege of Aero­nau­tics and Tech­nol­o­gy in the ‘Most Man­u­fac­turable’ cat­e­go­ry.

Mike Hirschberg, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety, said: “All of the stu­dent teams did real­ly impres­sive work. Not only did they come up with excit­ing air­craft designs that had to meet the demand­ing com­pe­ti­tion require­ments, they also had to deal with all the restric­tions and uncer­tain­ty caused by COVID-19. They now are bet­ter pre­pared for design­ing real-life rotor­craft and eVTOL air­craft.”

A total of $5,500 was award­ed by VFS dur­ing the com­pe­ti­tion. In addi­tion to the $3,500 in final awards, $2,000 had been award­ed pre­vi­ous­ly. In Decem­ber 2020, each of the sev­en teams sub­mit­ted pre­lim­i­nary design report with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Uni­ver­si­ty being award­ed $750 for com­ing first.

Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty and Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty fin­ished joint sec­ond and received $500, while the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land being award­ed $250 for com­ing third.

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety had intend­ed to hold the com­pe­ti­tion dur­ing the same time­frame at the US Army’s Com­bat Capa­bil­i­ties Devel­op­ment Com­mand (DEVCOM) Army Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry (ARL) Robot­ics Research Col­lab­o­ra­tion Cam­pus (R2C2) near Aberdeen in Mary­land.

ARL signed a five-year Edu­ca­tion­al Part­ner­ship Agree­ment with VFS ear­li­er this year in order to host the event and col­lab­o­rate on ver­ti­cal flight edu­ca­tion out­reach ini­tia­tives.

Prepa­ra­tions are already under­way for next year’s com­pe­ti­tion, with uni­ver­si­ties from around the world encour­aged to form teams and take part. The flight test­ing por­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion is planned to take place on the ARL R2C2 site in spring 2022. More details will be announced lat­er this year.