Designing Drones: Applying Schoolwork to Product Design

ABOUT THIS WEBINAR
We are here to share our experience as product design engineers. Specifically, we will highlight where our college classes have been applicable and where we have used skills learned at Skydio.

At Skydio, we work on a fast schedule with a brilliant team of mechanical, electrical, and reliability engineers. In the past 5 years, we have designed and sold 3 drones, 3 chargers, 2 controllers, a beacon, and a dock. In this accelerated schedule, we need to identify where to dive into the engineering details and where to use straightforward solutions and intuition. As you might expect, the details involve our college curriculum:

— We use heat transfer to find cooling solutions for the core processor and other toasty PCB components
— We use statics to model brackets and braces and study why things break
— We use dynamics to design moving parts and understand drop tests
— We work with high power, high speed, and high-density electronics
— We use circuit simulations to help predict the behavior before we prototype them

Just like with studying for tests, with more experience, we are able to focus our efforts. We see where the heat sink ribbing is more defined by manufacturing limitations than by the thermal calculations. Or where the most efficient circuit is the worst option to pass electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing. The best solution doesn’t necessarily come from a textbook.

We like working at Skydio because we get to solve early design problems and then follow the parts to production. As mechanical engineers, we learn the details of CNC machining, injection molding, casting, designing for manufacturing, assembly line setup, and crafting manufacturing instructions. We also get very good at reworking mistakes. As electrical engineers, our job is to integrate electrical systems such as processors and sensors. We also engage with electronic manufacturers to help produce and test our circuit boards.

ADDITIONAL INFO
  • Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
  • Price: Free
  • Language: English
  • Who can attend? Everyone
  • Dial-in available? (listen only): Not available.
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