Support Innovation in UAV Design at GMU

Friends, family, Mason alumni, and GoFundMe community members,

This is the inaugural year of George Mason University's participation in the SUAS UAV design competition. I spent the past two years developing this new project, which Mason adopted this year as a senior capstone project. As a new project, we began without a corporate or university sponsor to support our research and design efforts, so we have been fully responsible for sourcing our own funding.

Our team is currently searching for donors to help us raise $3000 to cover the remaining cost of supplies and competition fees.

We are designing a modular fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs, aka drones) to support a variety of payloads and offer versatile mission support capabilities. The UAV will be required to takeoff/land and navigate a flight path autonomously while performing additional tasks. Our design will focus on environmental monitoring capabilities, and we recently applied for multispectral and visible light mapping cameras through the Patriot Green Fund. We plan to use these cameras to measure vegetation health and detect, identify, and localize ground objects within surveyed areas. Our final vehicle design will be capable of mapping a minimum of 10 acres per flight, and it will have a minimum flight range of 15 miles. These capabilities will be used to support Mason’s Forager’s Forest project under the supervision of Dr. Dann Sklarew.

The end goal of our project is to compete in the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) competition, held at St. Mary’s County Regional Airport (MD) in June 2025, which has an entry fee of $1500/team.

If our project is successful, there is also potential to build a small business based on our modular UAV platform. We hope to provide emergency response, environmental monitoring, experimental testing, and package delivery capabilities to future customers, built using interchangeable components and tool-free assembly methods.

All excess funds will remain in a Mason RSO bank account for future students to use towards competing at future SUAS competitions.

If you are interested in supporting our project beyond this GoFundMe page, please contact us for more information.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our project and for offering your support!

Team members:

• Rylan Pettit

• Nikitha Kumar

• Ethan O’Connell

• Grant Sibley

Faculty Advisor:

• Daigo Shishika, PhD

Faculty Sponsors:

• ThanhVu Nguyen, PhD

• Dann Sklarew, PhD

Capabilities of interest:

• Ground object detection and classification using machine learning

• Heat signature detection & monitoring

• Vegetation health evaluation using the NDVI

• Payload delivery

• Aerial object avoidance

• Long range/duration flight

• Large payload mass capacity

• Collapsible for transport

Anticipated costs:

Funding progress:

Our team was awarded with $1000 in resources by Dr. Nguyen in October to support our plans to incorporate machine learning capabilities into our design. Our application for ~$2300 through the Patriot Green Fund is currently in review. This funding application was filed in collaboration with Dr. Sklarew. We also plan to apply for funding through Mason’s registered student organization (RSO) fund in Spring 2025. Our total anticipated cost is $6000, including the SUAS entry fee.

Prior purchases:

These purchases were made using funding provided by Dr. Nguyen.