HPRC 2021-22

As Payload Division Lead during the 2021–22 academic year, I led a team of ~30 students to create an autonomous, folding-arm search and rescue quadcopter to be launched in and deployed from WPI’s High Power Rocketry Club launch vehicle for the 2022 Spaceport America Cup. As this was the team’s first year competing in the Spaceport America Cup and as such, we overcame significant challenges which come from switching competitions. Additionally, coming out of the pandemic, the team saw its largest growth yet, from the previous year’s 80 members to just over 130, requiring better management and planning practices.

As the new competition didn’t provide the level of guidance in terms of functional payloads that the team was used to, the Payload Division started the year by defining a set of high-level requirements, along with an accompanying mission. The mission being to conduct an autonomous search and rescue mission to locate the launch vehicle once it had landed safely under parachute.

After leading the team through a period of rapid prototyping for various vehicle types to complete the mission, we selected a horizontal unfolding-arm quadcopter to be deployed from the rocket, descend under parachute, and deploy from the ground to conduct its mission. The quadcopter payload was designed to fit in a custom-designed retention system to actively retain the payload within the launch vehicle until deployment. The system provided many challenges with integrating various innovative designs such as quadcopter arm locking, robotic stabilization systems, and custom electronics solutions, all while needing to be non-integral to the rocket’s structure.

In June 2022, I had the opportunity to travel with the team to Spaceport America in New Mexico for the competition. We arrived and navigated the challenges of a new competition, all while flawlessly passing a rigorous safety inspection and placing 7th out of 150 for our technical report. Through days of system prep and rain, we persevered and successfully integrated our launch vehicle, passed a final structural safety inspection, and set the vehicle on the pad for launch. Despite a successful launch and powered ascent, our launch vehicle suffered an in-flight failure at motor burnout resulting in the breakup and ballistic descent of the vehicle. Once given permission, we went on to recover all pieces of the launch vehicle while assisting other teams and the competition organizers in their recovery and safety efforts. Despite the failure, we kept our spirits high and continued to participate in the competition as we had been, extracting data from our damaged altimeters, and ended up receiving the Team Sportsmanship Award. Instead of taking these events as a sign to give up and move on to the next year’s project, I spearheaded the effort to compile all relevant sources of data to start analyzing the failure. This led to me co-leading the development of a formal failure analysis and determining the root cause of the failure, all while planning and preparing for the coming year’s competition in parallel.

The failure analysis can be found below and on the team’s website.

08/2021 – 07/2022