AIAA Design, Build, Fly Team - MULLET Competition Aircraft 2021-2022

MULLET, the Medical Unmanned Low-Level Electric Transport, is Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Daytona Beach’s aircraft for the 2021–2022 AIAA Design, Build, Fly competition. This UAV was designed to perform four missions, including a ground mission and three flight missions. Mission 1 is a deployment flight that demonstrates the aircraft’s flight capability; Mission 2 is a staging flight for the transportation of vaccine syringes; Mission 3 is a delivery flight for the transportation and deployment of vaccine vial packages; and the Ground Mission is a demonstration of the ability to rapidly prepare the aircraft for flight. The aircraft was designed, manufactured, and flown by a team of 40 undergraduate aerospace engineering students. The design process comprised three phases: conceptual, preliminary, and detail design. Initially, the conceptual design focused on analyzing the requirements with a scoring analysis to select the optimal payload that maximized the mission scores. After the aircraft and subsystem configurations were selected, the weight, wing, tail, and propulsion system were sized during the preliminary design. A detail design then focused on the aircraft’s structural characteristics and systems integration. The manufacturing process followed with the goal of fabricating the aircraft to the designed specifications and weight. A detailed schedule was developed and was continuously refined to manufacture each aircraft iteration in a timely manner, enabling rapid prototyping throughout the design, build, and fly process. Finally, a testing plan was established to evaluate a series of test objectives essential to the aircraft’s mission performance