NAU Student Engineers Soar with Boeing Drone Project

By Diane Hope, FBN

When Cassie Petit, development director at Northern Arizona University’s College of Engineering, Informatics and Applied Sciences (CEIAS), reached out to Boeing about being involved in a student capstone project, she wasn’t sure how the giant aviation manufacturer would respond.

Fortunately, her Boeing contact was Senior Engineering Manager Amanda Nemec, an NAU mechanical engineering alumna, who now sits on the CEIAS advisory council.

After a discussion with Nemec, other Boeing staff and NAU faculty members, the project took off. Boeing had been developing a surveillance drone airframe, but the prototype weighed four pounds (just slightly less than a pet Chihuahua). The NAU student team was charged with designing and building a lighter, more maneuverable frame. It needed to be 3D printed and study enough to survive a crash from a height of 10 feet.

“For fun, we gave them a stretch goal of making it fly. Honestly, I didn’t think in the short time they had that it would be possible to make it happen,” said Nemec. Boeing also wanted the frame design to give enough space to mount pre-purchased parts including a flight controller, a camera, a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging sensing system that uses pulsed laser light to measure distances) and a gimbal.

The student members of the team were Colby Murphy, Jay Khunt, Dante Faria, Damien Brothers and Tommy Schreiber, supervised by Associate Professor David Willy and Assistant Professor Armin Eilaghi – both in NAU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Nemec, along with Michael Vogelsang, a mechanical design and analysis engineer at Boeing, and several other specialists there, provided support to the team.

Nemec found working with the NAU engineering students to be a very positive experience. “The excitement that they brought to the project was inspiring. They worked incredibly hard to not just meet the requirements we gave them, but to beat them.”

What the students came up with was a frame made of Onyx Polymer and ABS, a thermo-plastic that is typically paired with high-impact polystyrene. But in this case, the students used Onyx, a nylon

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