MUAS Drop Mechanism

MUAS (Maryland Unmanned Aerial Systems) is a student team building drones for the SUAS student competition, where teams from across the world compete to build the highest-performing search and rescue drone. As an engineer on the airframe team, my team’s responsibility was to create a compact, lightweight, and fully externally mounted drop mechanism with an adjustable center of gravity. The finalized system successfully and reliably drops a range of rescue payloads and lands on skids without failure.