Quality Assurance and Safety Tools for Emerging Drone Technologies

Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) designs and operates high performance Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS) to deliver payloads between depots and warehouses. Safety and quality assurance (QA) play an integral role in assuring that drone technology is accepted by the public, consumers, and the Canadian government. The demand for more advanced testing on both the drone hardware and software must be thoroughly carried out to achieve such acceptance. The proposed research project focuses on meeting this demand by investigating both the physical safety and control system quality of the drone.

Ground-Based Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicle (RPAV) Tracking System

Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) designs and operates high performance Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS) to deliver payloads between depots and warehouses. The DDC engineering department is looking to design and deploy a ground-based system to track and point at the Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicle (RPAV) during flight in real-time.

Design and Development of an Emergency Response Station

The remote First Nations communities of Canada suffer from a dire lack of access to emergency response systems and services during times of crises. They lack access to life-saving services such as paramedics, 911 services, and search and rescue services due to their geographic isolation. This often puts them in grave danger and results in loss of lives.

Topology optimization of UAV components

Unmanned aerial vehicles (also known as drones) constitute a sector of the Canadian aerospace industry that is growing very rapidly. Because there is a broad range of applications for drones, there is also a wide variety of drone configurations. This, coupled with the small size of drones, leads to a scarcity of convenient rules-of-thumb and guidelines for the design of drone structures. In addition, because of the small size of drones, small reductions in the mass of a drone structure lead to relatively large proportional increases in drone payload.