CSUB Robotics Club gears up for competitions

Members will enter UAS vehicle, 3D-printed plane

By California State University, Bakersfield

October 23^rd, 2023

A pair of competitions may be months away, but California State University, Bakersfield’s Robotics Club is already hard at work. The club is still new, but its members are eager to prove what CSUB students can do.

In the spring, the Robotics Club will enter two CSU-wide competitions: The 3D-Printed Fixed-Wing Aircraft Competition in May and the California Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition in June. They will be the group’s first competitive outings as a club.

“I’m excited for the new opportunities this is going to bring for the Robotics Club,” said Brhyona Thomas, a computer engineering major in her junior year. “Hopefully we can get into more competitions and get our name out there.”

The competitions — both hosted by CSU Los Angeles — will put the club’s design and engineering skills to the test.

The larger of the two is the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) competition. Co-hosted by and held at the Mojave Air & Space Port, this competition requires entrants to develop a UAS vehicle (a type of drone) for autonomous flight; waypoint navigation; object detection, classification and localization; and air delivery of a package to a target.

Members of the Robotics Club, which started in the spring 2023 semester, had already been working on their UAS before they even heard of the competition. Meeting in the CSUB Fab Lab, they worked on three different simple projects as a way to get the club going: an arm, a car and a drone.

“As we started developing a simple drone that was more of a hobby-grade, Bobby (Hartsock, Fab Lab specialist) came to us with the idea of modifying it to be used for search and rescue,” said Alex Grijalva, a senior studying physics. “The search and rescue aspects basically overlap with the Mojave competition, so it progressed into that.”

The UAS, as it is now, takes the shape of an ElectriStar hobby plane. The club is working on adding all the bells and whistles that will make it a UAS. This summer, the team crashed a couple planes, unfortunate sacrifices that at least led to lessons learned. The software powering the vehicle “has been a challenge, but so far it’s been working great once we know what we’re doing,” Grijalva said.

The club’s UAS is currently a fixed wing vehicle, meaning it has a set of rigid wings similar to an airplane. Unlike a quadcopter, it can’t pause in the air mid-flight and its speed has made getting a clear image from the UAS’ camera difficult. Over the next few months, the club members will have to figure out how to improve the image quality or consider switching to a quadcopter.

“If we switch, it will make some things easier and some things harder,” Grijalva explained.

Alex Grijalva, Gareth Ogunjobi and Brhyona Thomas work on their UAS in the Fab Lab Annex.

While the UAS competition involves a lot of engineering, programming and tech, the CSU 3D-Printed Fixed-Wing Aircraft Competition is all about design and endurance. This competition will test teams’ uniquely designed and 3D-printed planes on the Jesse Owens Track and Field Complex on the CSU LA campus.

This event has three components: the design competition for the most innovative design, the flight competition for the longest duration flight and the simulation competition for performance in a virtual environment.

The Robotics Club is still in the early planning stages for this competition. Though the size and design of their plane is still to be determined, they know it will need to be lightweight to stay in the air for long.

Club members said they’ve received help from both Hartsock in the Fab Lab and the Bakersfield Airplane Radio Control Society (B.A.R.K.S.), which has given them a space to fly their planes until the club receives permission to fly on the CSUB campus. The club also thanked Dr. Jane Dong — dean of the university’s School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering — and fellow NSME supporters Dr. Andrea Medina, Dr. Charles Lam, Jeff Deguia and their faculty adviser Dr. Travis Moore.

In addition to Grijalva and Thomas, the core crew working on the UAS vehicle and 3D-printed plane include Gareth Ogunjobi, Pablo Rodriguez Quinonez, Bailey Schooler and James Odle. The club currently has 33 members signed up, though only a handful have been active so far.

“Hopefully now that it’s the school year again, we’ll have more people,” said Ogunjobi, a junior majoring in electrical engineering. “For the most part, from getting the drone to where we are now, it was just a few of us working over the summer.”

Thomas hopes hearing about the competitions will encourage more people to join the Robotics Club. Whether new members can participate in the UAS and 3D plane builds will depend on their areas of interest and abilities, but the group is always open to other projects beyond the builds for these two competitions.

“If there are more people who want to join the club and give us ideas as to what to work on, I feel like there’s a lot of potential but there are not a lot of people who actually have the time and motivation to want to do a side project,” she said. “If more people came to the club, they could give their own ideas about what they want to build.”

Olivia Arias, a sophomore electrical engineering major, recently joined the club for a drone team meeting. She was new to the group but recognized some members from previous classes they shared. The meeting was the first she heard of the upcoming competitions, but she was happy to help however she could.

“It seems like you guys have a lot of time to figure things out,” she told the other members. “I’m excited. I don’t know how I’ll contribute, but I will!”