Why Use 3D-Printed Drones?
Transcript
Glenn Murphy, Student, University of Virginia
If you were to go out today and fly the plane and it comes down hard, and you break a piece, we can come back here, we can hit “print,” get the piece out of the printer, snap it into place and we’re ready to fly again, immediately.
Michael Balazs, Chief Engineer, Mitre Corporation
So the Razor is a fully 3D printed UAV, designed from the ground up to take advantage of 3D printing technology. It’s full air-frame, everything including skin is 3D printed.
Dave Sheffler, Lecturer and Researcher, University of Virginia
We’ve gone through a few iterations on this aircraft, not only structurally but also aerodynamically. And the 3D printing process has allowed us to that very rapidly and very easily. We can design the system on the computer, we can analyze it, we can do flight simulations, we can model that in a CAT program and then that model transfers directly to the 3D printer.
Michael Balazs
3D printing is a very interesting process. And the best way to think about this or visualize it, is to think of your normal ink jet printer back at home. When it goes back and forth it’s dropping little drops of ink to create a 2 dimensional image. Now imagine that it drops little drops of plastic instead. Now when it goes back and forth it’s actually creating a 3 dimensional object.
Dave Sheffler
If we had tried to build this airplane 5 or 10 years ago without the capabilities of 3D printing we would be building a conventional aircraft and they’re usually all hand built. They’re very labor intensive. 3D printed airplanes can truly be built completely autonomously. We’ve simplified the assembly process so it’s really a matter of clicking together a couple of parts.
Michael Balazs
Somebody asks you, “what are you doing this summer?” and I get to tell them I’m working on developing a fully autonomous drone and guess what? We 3D printed it. And that’s just a really cool thing to say because it’s on the cutting edge of so many different technologies all at the same time.
