High-flying Rowan Engineering students design FAA drone cage

As if finals, internships, summer plans and graduation weren’t enough, five Rowan University Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering students designed a drone cage for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in May that could one day help make air travel safer.

The cage, made of tubular aluminum trusses with steel corner bases, was created for the FAA’s inaugural Aviation STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Day and the Air Traffic Controller Association Technical Center Tuesday events at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City May 16-17.

Rowan designed, FAA constructed

Measuring 16 feet tall by 20 feet long by 12 feet wide with netting suspended one to two feet from the floor for added safety, the cage was expertly designed by the Rowan engineering students and constructed by FAA personnel so that the flight of “drones,” or Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in FAA parlance, could be demonstrated at the FAA events  in partnership with Rowan’s CAVE® Virtual Reality Center at the South Jersey Technology Park in Mantua Township.

Graduating senior James Ritchie, an electrical and computer engineering major who served as project coordinator, said the cage contained dozens of paper “markers,” black and white locator graphics that enabled the drones to read and transmit their position back to the VR Center.

“As the drone flew in the cage, a camera onboard the drone read markers affixed to the netting, indicating which were in view at any particular time. Custom-written software processed the imagery from the camera, and the FAA relayed the processed information back to Rowan so the flights of the drones could be modeled and simultaneously viewed in virtual reality,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie, an FAA intern who graduated from Rowan May 13, has accepted a full-time position as an electrical engineer with the FAA. Other members of Rowan’s multi-disciplinary design team included ECE majors Michael Paule, Aaron Yangello and Jason Myers and mechanical engineering major Robert Samuel.

Students challenged

The students were challenged to design a cage to fit specific safety and technical parameters, to make it modular so it could be easily assembled and disassembled, and to keep construction within a very tight budget. But those weren’t their biggest concern.

“Our biggest challenge was just finding the time,” Ritchie said. “The semester was ending, we had papers due and finals to study for, and we had three or four weeks to design the cage. We had to make the time to get it done.”

The Rowan students were joined at the symposium by STEM students from around the nation, including some from Purdue University, Rutgers University, Drexel University and The Ohio State University.

Paule and Samuel said the best lesson from the experience – aside from the hands-on engineering work – might have been their collaboration with an actual partner.

“Working with a full-fledged research partner is an interaction I’d never had before,” Paule said.

“It’s a little different when you make something for a professor and you’re getting a grade on it,” Samuel said. “This was real world and it was actually more rewarding.”

Strong research ties

The STEM symposium featured demonstrations and presentations highlighting national aviation initiatives and included a college/university day featuring undergraduate aviation research. 

Karen DiMeo, drone research technical lead for the FAA Tech Center, said a central component of the event was a series of drone demonstrations highlighting Rowan’s unique VR Center.

“The FAA and the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering have strong research ties,” said DiMeo, of the FAA’s Next Gen Advanced Concepts and Technology Development Division. “When we found ourselves in the position of needing a drone cage to demonstrate our research, we saw a natural fit in working with Rowan students.”

Making air travel safer, virtually

George Lecakes, director of Rowan’s VR Center and a member of the first cohort of students now seeking a Rowan Ph.D. in engineering, pointed out that as the drone buzzed about the cage, it gauged its location by reading the 30 paper markers placed throughout and relayed information back to Rowan.

“The information helped us produce XYZ coordinates for the drone’s position,” Lecakes said. “This type of study will help with monitoring drones in the future by researching alternate means for tracking their position.”

Cliff Johnson, one of the FAA’s drone pilots and also an FAA engineer and Rowan Engineering alumnus, worked on the project directly with the students to ensure the design came to fruition.

“The real power of this approach is that it showed how government/academia partnerships can really move the aviation industry forward and promote new ways of thinking to solve the challenges of tomorrow,” said Johnson.