While I was interning at Textron, I worked on Aerosonde, a ~100 lb unmanned air vehicle. The team was considering some design changes that would move the aircrafts vertical center of gravity, and while analysis had been performed on these changes, they needed to be validated with actual testing. I used a MATLAB script to generate combinations of ballast weights and locations that I could mount in a hollowed-out version of the Aerosonde. While the air vehicle’s vertical center of gravity needed to be moved, the overall mass, horizontal center of gravity, and rotational inertias needed to be maintained to be able to compare data across the different setups.

 

After selecting three configurations to test, I manufacturing the steel weights and mounts, and then performed launch testing to collect accelerometer and IMU data. I wrote a MATLAB script that used a 2-phase Butterworth filter and followed the SAE J211 standard for filtering the accelerometer data. I also caught an error that had been missed previously that resulted in gimbal lock in the IMU, requiring me to use quaternions instead of the xyz accelerometer data. The results of this testing provided confidence in the new vertical center of gravity and directly resulted in design changes for the next generation of Aerosonde.