Park Record, June 4, 2024--Silver Summit Academy seniors win engineering award with firefighting drone design
How would you design a drone compatible enough to be realistically taken and used at the scene of a wildfire yet systematically complex enough to provide accurate and helpful measurements to those fighting that fire?
It’s a daunting question, one that three Engineering Capstone class students at Silver Summit Academy took on as the annual Real World Design Challenge, a competition that pit them against 21 national and international competitors. What they devised, aptly named Inferno, earned them the 2024 International Innovation Merit Award.
The three seniors — Tess Cronin, Gibson Hochhauser and Neve Stein — found ways to control the device from an unlimited range, a way to forgo drones’ usual charging time and materials that can hold up even in intense wildfire conditions.
“The challenge was to create a wildfire surveillance drone that could be compatible, that could be transported easily,” Stein said. “It had to be able to track vegetation, hydration, where the fire edge was — all the information about a fire and send it back to control without needing anyone there to control it.”
This, of course, presented unique challenges. They had to ensure it wouldn’t melt. They had to prepare it for large variants in pressure and wind systems. They had to make sure that — if something did go wrong and communications were temporarily lost — the aircraft wouldn’t try to land itself where flames would destroy it.
“It’s a bad place to be for anything,” Hochhauser said of the conditions. “Especially something that you don’t have hands-on control over.”
Normally, Hochhauser said, teams who compete in the project have eight to ten members.
But when their engineering teacher Deborah Rydalach pitched the competition as a possible capstone project, the three friends didn’t let the size of their competitors keep them from getting to work.
“Let’s just learn as much as we can, and let’s just absorb as much content as we can,” Hochhauser remembered thinking.
Each of them brought different interests within the world of engineering to the table, and they divided the work and the challenges they faced as they constructed Inferno.
“When you traditionally think of a drone, you think of just a giant battery in the middle,” Hochhauser said.
Yet as he considered the best way to power the drone, it became clear to him that typical lithium batteries would present definite challenges for firefighters relying on a drone: First, extreme heat and lithium are not friends, and combining them leads to explosions, and second, typical power systems would take two to three hours for a drone to fully charge. And even if that kind of time is available, power given to charge a drone means power taken from another resource that would otherwise be at firefighters’ disposal.
“Power is very much needed. Electricity is needed,” Hochhauser said.
So he decided on a different approach, suiting the drone with a small generator.
“As soon as the drone lands, you can just pour gas in it. It’s a specific, high-tech gas, but you can just pour fuel in it and just get right back in the sky,” Hochhauser said. “Fire command always has this resource at their disposal. The fuel used for the generator is much more common and much more easily accessible and a much more abundant resource in these situations than electricity.”
Stein said the group also had to consider specific challenges when planning a communication system for drone operators to use and collect data from the airborne device.
She said the range necessary for the project was at least 15 miles. That was a number she decided to slam past by using a satellite communications system, which allows drone operators to connect and transmit information back and forth with the device through the use of satellites.
“It’s reliable and has like a 99.99% connectivity rate. You’re not going to get better than that for infinite range,” Stein said. “If ground control can’t see what’s going on, satellites can take over; it can go automatic and go on its own.”
The drone, she said, has a built-in GPS.
“If it goes down,” she continued, “if they lose contact — they can’t find it — having that built-in GPS and having that connectivity rate, it will be fine. It can go somewhere the fire isn’t and land and be completely fine.”
Stein said the technique is relatively new in the world of drones, though she expects to see it become more and more common in the future.
While they identified the power system and drone communications method as two of the biggest challenges they had to overcome, the team still had plenty of other work they accomplished to fully design Inferno. On top of compiling a detailed, 30-page report on their creation, they determined the best measurements for the drone, the best compacting structure and shape, the best materials and a way to make the Inferno’s assembly take no more than 10 minutes.
“These students were phenomenal in attacking the Real World Design Challenge,” Rydalach said. “From day one they engaged in the engineering design process with gusto. I was incredibly proud of how these students applied their prior knowledge and experience from personal experiences and previous (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses to come up with a viable design. On top of that, they communicated their entire plan with eloquence and professionalism. It has been an honor to see these students excel.”
Though the students digitally designed Inferno, the contest didn’t require them to bring their design to fruition, and building it would cost an estimated $20,713.14. The three partners also explained they don’t currently plan to seek the funding or move their plan from the screen to reality as all of them graduated days ago and are headed to prestigious engineering programs — Cronin to Georgia Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering and computer science, Hochhauser to Columbia University for mechanical engineering and Stein to Drexel University, also with mechanical engineering in mind.
Of course, that doesn’t mean their work was a waste. While Cronin said they would likely need to refine their ideas to construct an actual drone, the value of the challenge lay not in the idea of a physical Inferno so much as in the steps of the challenge itself.
“It was more of a great experience on innovation,” she said. “But it was a fun design to make and take to this competition.”
To younger students who are interested in the engineering field, the trio gave a consistent piece of advice: continue to fail up.
Hochhauser, who initially became interested in engineering processes when he played with bricks as a kid, now plans to continue researching Electromagnetic propulsion. He spent his last summer writing a research paper about a motor that would be powered through that propulsion, but it never worked.
He’s still fascinated by the possibilities.
“I failed, so there’s basically a published paper of me just saying how I failed,” he said.
But when he thinks of one piece of metal naturally sucking toward another, it still brings him back to what he described as the mindset of a two year old playing with magnetic tiles.
Stein didn’t experience a pull toward engineering until she was a high school student and started enrolling in engineering classes.
She combined her love for paleontology with her newfound engineering interests when she and Hochhauser built a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex.
“That really was my first time actually doing something and coding it,” she said. “I realized how I can implement it into the things I love, like environmental science or dinosaurs.”
Drexel, she said, hosts an Engineers Without Borders chapter, and that’s what she wants to pursue.
“Maybe get water to a community that doesn’t have water,” she said. “That’s the direction I’m leaning towards.”
Cronin first became interested in engineering when her parents gifted her Dash and Dot Robots for Christmas when she was in the fifth grade.
“I had this attachment that could be a catapult, and my sister and I were playing a game where we were trying to get a ping pong ball into this little bowl,” she said. “I couldn’t do it for the life of me. I’m the worst shot you’ll ever meet.”
The frustration turned to motivation, and she won the competition with her sister, who she claimed still hasn’t paid her a promised reward.
She did end the game with a lesson, though.
“I could take something I couldn’t do and use my brain and use other aspects to create something I could do,” she said. “Even though it was small and little, it was fun to know that I could do it just in a different way.”
She has two main areas of interest headed into college — aerospace defense and prosthetics. The irony of pursuing two seemingly opposing disciplines is not lost on her.
“You can explore them both in college,” she said. “I just think it’s interesting how similar you can get from something that’s engineering, that I feel feels so inhuman, to something like the medical field, which is the most human you can get.”
“Don’t be afraid to fail,” Stein said. “The best part is being like, ‘Oh, it didn’t work out.’ … Let it sit for a little bit and then be like, ‘Oh wait, I see why now.’ And then you can improve.”