Rotor Powered Rocket Lander
In my senior capstone project, I worked on a team of 6 to build a system to with the goal of a vertically and softly landing of a rocket body from a free-fall scenario. Here, we used a deployable quadcopter setup to control the movement of the rocket and deployable landing legs to hold up the rocket at the ground.
The control system was built using a Pixhawk Flight Controller and a Raspberry Pi connected to the ground station via an SSH signal in order to give commands to the rocket landing system. Using the Python DroneKit Repository we could write programs to run different types of missions with the Rocket Lander.
The Pixhawk contains an IMU, Compass and Gyroscope and controlled the servos which activated and deployed the arms and legs.
The arms were held inside the rocket body with a locking mechanics held by a servo. Once the rocket body detected a fall-scenario, the servo would release the arms which got deployed with torsional springs and locked to the top with spring pins with the arm body set-up.
​
Using the quadcopter setup, the thrust system of the rocket was able to be highly reactive, which allows for better control.
The design had three landing legs, which were built using primary and secondary struts. They were into a stowed position with a pin holding them into place. Once a servo pulled each of the pins, they would be released where a spring would pull down the legs onto a carriage into a deployed position at the bottom. Here, they were held into place at that location.
​
The struts were printed with the Mark Forge Printer which uses a ultra-high-strength Continuous Fiber which yields parts as strong as 6061-T6 Aluminum.