OBU’s Engineering Program Soars with Drone Project

December 12, 2024

On Dec. 5, freshman engineering students at OBU participated in a drone competition on the band practice field. This event, led by Dr. Chuck Baukal, director of the engineering program, gave students of six teams the opportunity to create or modify drones to compete in delivering the most amount of food packets back and forth across the field over 30 minutes. 

Baukal said, “The purpose of the project is to expose the students to a real design project to prepare them for their senior capstone project and to prepare them for projects in industry after they graduate.”

The instructor chose the teams based on the student’s prior knowledge of drones and 3D printing. Points were distributed based on the number of packets delivered, how accurately the packets were dropped on a target and for the lowest cost.

These students have been working on their drones throughout the entire semester. Five teams purchased and modified quadcopters, while one team created a homemade airplane out of poster board.

“This project is a combination of design and humanitarian effort,” Baukal said. “The United Nations developed RUTF (ready-to-use therapeutic food), which is designed for "treatment of severe acute malnutrition without medical complications and with appetite" for children over 6 months old.”

Once opened, this food stays edible for 24 hours. It does not require refrigeration or heating and provides nutrients to potentially starving children so that they might not face death.

Three of the six teams had significant issues with their initial trial runs on December 5: two of the drones crashed and were unable to deliver any packets and the third team’s dropping mechanism failed, so they had to land instead of dropping the packets as required. All three teams ran new or modified drones a few days later with much better success. Teams running a second trial had their results averaged with their first trial.

The most packets delivered over 30 minutes was 68 with an average of 23 packets delivered. The average drop radius from the target ranged from as close as 20 inches to as far as 73 feet.

While it was close, the winning team of Jacob Cardwell, a mechanical engineering major from Piedmont, Malachi Cliff, an electrical engineering major from Tulsa, Kendyl Fowler, an electrical engineering major from Meeker, Lukas Mabon, an electrical engineering major from Cleveland, and Jesse Tisdell, a mechanical engineering major from Choctaw had the highest overall score.

“The intent of the drone project is to see how drones might be used in developing countries to deliver this life-saving food,” Baukal said. “We simulated the packets with zip-lock bags of approximately the same size and weight as the actual RUTF but filled with Nutella.”

Though this is an annual event, last year was completely different than this year's competition. This is because last year was cooperative rather than competitive.

Currently, most students are in the mechanical engineering path with a few on the path to electrical engineering.

Two freshmen majoring in mechanical engineering, Terry Buster and Brendon Rice, explained how this project helped prepare them for their future careers.

Buster, from Pond Creek, said, “The project helped simulate the unexpected problems. For example, we had lots of issues that rose up last minute while trying to get something done or things that didn’t work. We had to rethink, redo and find new ways to do stuff.”

Rice, from Norman, said, “Things don’t always go the way as planned, which is why we have these tests. We had to go through and make a lot of adjustments. It’s the same thing in the workforce, so this stimulates what we do in the workforce.”

The future of the engineering program at OBU continues to look bright. The program began in the fall of 2023 with 37 students, more than three times the original goal. There are now 56 students in the program.

With 14 deposits and 72 admissions for next year already in place, the future is looking bright for the engineering program here at Oklahoma Baptist University.

“I believe the students learned a lot more from this project than they would ever have learned from a textbook,” Baukal said. “They learned about teamwork, communication and project management, in addition to engineering design. Because this is a first-semester freshman course, the students did not know each other before the project and had to learn to work together. Things did not always go as expected in the competition, which is what sometimes happens in the real world as well. I’m proud of the hard work these students put into their projects. This should serve them well in their futures as engineers.”