2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Robotics has become one of the most popular parts in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education for high/middle/elementary school students to understand engineering and technology. In recent years, flying robots (or drones) are also widely used to teach high/middle school students fundamentals of computer programs. However, even the students completed the programming course, they may still lack understanding of drone working principle. This paper explores an approach to teach students the fundamental drone aeronautics knowledge with the laboratory programming of drones.

This course was designed by professors from an Aeronautics college for high school students who work after-school and weekends during the school year or summertime. In early 2021, the college applied to offer a certificate program, UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) Design, Application and Operation, for college students and got approved by the Education Department of the State. Then, in late 2021, the college applied and got a fund from FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to provide a tuition-free early higher education for high school students by enabling them to complete the majority of the credits in the UAS certificate program while they still enrolled in high schools. Since the purpose of the program is to provide students hands-on skills so that they can achieve success in their career paths as versatile engineers and technicians, most courses in the certificate program are introduction or application-oriented, such as Introduction to Drones, Drone Law and Part 107 License, or Fundamentals of Land Surveying and Photogrammetry. However, one of the courses, Introduction to Drone Aeronautics and Laboratory, is more related to the theory on how and why a drone can fly, furthermore, how to control a drone during flight. To organize the lectures and laboratory for high school students who are interested in pursuing the certificate can be a challenge.

Many courses from different schools and online resources have been investigated to develop the course of Drone Aeronautics. The small drone Co-drone from Robolink company [1] has been selected as the experimental flatform for students to examine how drones fly and how to design a controller stabilizing a drone. However, the organization of a set of well-explained lectures is a relatively difficult task. Based on the curriculum requirement of the certificate program, the lectures were developed to contain the following contents: (a) introduction to flight principle of drones, i.e., forces on a drone, such as lift, weight, drag, and thrust. To make a proper payload and balance forces on a drone, selecting on-board components and trade-off design were discussed; (b) The proportional-integral-directive (PID) controller and how it works to stabilize a drone and reduce the steady-state error were introduced; (c) forces acting on a drone in different coordinates, gravity versus the aerodynamic forces, were explained together with coordinate transformations. (d) In the final stage, students were encouraged to examinate the dynamic model of the three-dimensional quadcopter and adjust the control parameters, but do not require them to derive the three-dimensional drone dynamic equations.

The course was taught in summer 2022 to 35 high school students from 17 high schools in the economically disadvantaged communities of the city. All students came from ethnic minority families. Prerequisite for the recruitment is that students’ GPA must be higher than 2.5 with a recommendation letter from their school advisor. Upon the completion of the course, the class survey was collected from the students. From the survey and other assessment tools such as final examination and laboratory reports, it was found that most students’ knowledge of drones has been significantly improved by participating the class and lab. However, the enjoyment of the course is different based on students’ mathematical background. Students with better mathematical skills were really excited by working on various mathematical operations whereas some students felt they needed more mathematical courses before they came to the class.

In the future, the improvements of the course will be to develop more visible tools for different type of students to learn drone aeronautics. Some students may be able to derive a result based on the learned mathematical skills and some other students may be able to understand the stable flight of a drone by envisioning continuous force changes and balance by the control of DC motor speeds of a drone. Nevertheless, the course helped high school students realize that mathematics is not only abstract numbers, but also a powerful tool for human being to solve various complex problems in the real world.