Aerospace engineering team designs lifesaving aircraft
Team Harmony was one of three out of 200 global teams to receive both the Stage 1 and Stage 2 prize — along with NASA’s University Innovation Award — for their quadrotor biplane design, moving closer to full-scale production.
Team Harmony members (from left) Reuben Stewart, Amit Gadag, Dr. Moble Benedict, Dr. David Coleman and Vishnu Saj.
When disaster strikes, every second counts.
For Dr. Moble Benedict and his team of aerospace engineering students at Texas A&M University, that urgency has shifted from the classroom to the sky as they prepare to build a full-scale, autonomous emergency response aircraft through the international GoAERO competition. The competition entails an innovative three-stage process that unites academia and industry to revolutionize emergency response.
“There is a gap in emergency response vehicles,” Benedict said. “On one hand, you have helicopters, which are limited in number and expensive to operate. On the other, there are drones that are capable of search, but not rescue. GoAERO is trying to address this gap. You need something with serious payload-carrying capabilities that’s not as expensive or complex as a helicopter. It needs to be able to carry significant loads, such as critical supplies or even a person.”
Benedict’s Team Harmony was one of 11 international teams to earn the $10,000 prize in Stage 1 of the competition, which involved creating a blueprint for their aircraft, QUEST. The design also won the NASA University Innovation Award.
QUEST is a quadrotor biplane that tilts at a 90-degree angle for transitioning from hover to cruise flight and combines the simplicity of a drone with the efficiency and speed of a fixed-wing aircraft. The team’s subscale prototypes demonstrated its real-world capabilities during flight testing. Their design and seven others received Stage 2 honors and an additional $40,000 in December.
In Stage 3 of the competition, the team will test their full-scale aircraft in a real-world environment simulating adverse conditions. They will have the opportunity to test a full-scale rescue aircraft in the GoAERO Fly-Off at the NASA Ames airfield in February of 2027.
Team Harmony is comprised of postdoctoral researcher Dr. David Coleman, who acts as the project’s chief engineer, and Ph.D. students Amit Gadag, Reuben Stewart and Vishnu Saj. Despite its success, Team Harmony is one of the smallest groups participating in GoAERO.
“Competitions like this offer the ability to develop prototypes with high technology readiness levels (TRL) and test them in a real-world environment,” said Coleman, who worked with Benedict on a similar Boeing competition called GoFly from 2018-20. “To get it off the ground, you need a minimum TRL of five or six, but that’s not going to work in a real-world situation. You really need a TRL of eight or nine to have a robust system that is going to fly in these adverse conditions.”
The team is meeting these challenges in the full-scale design process, with each member playing a critical role. Gadag specializes in the aircraft’s hardware construction, while Stewart focuses on flight dynamics and Saj on flight autonomy.
“Some of the biggest challenges are still to come in Stage 3,” Stewart said. “We’ve had some experience working with a subscale aircraft, but now, all the risks increase when jumping to full-scale. One of my responsibilities will be coming up with an extremely accurate flight dynamics model so that we can be better prepared to fly this aircraft in real life.”
The flight dynamics process entails building a digital twin of the full-scale aircraft to predict its motion and behavior in a simulation before the initial flight test at the RELLIS Campus. The team plans to start building the physical aircraft during the spring semester.
The team is mindful of the potential impact these projects could have on society and is highly motivated by the facilities and funding — including support from the WoodNext Foundation and the Texas A&M Foundation — that enable them to work on projects of this magnitude.
“When we get into the nitty-gritty of the engineering, we could easily forget the big picture,” Benedict said. “I see this as the future of disaster relief. One hundred of these flying around and dropping food, medical supplies or looking for people who are trapped — it’s a big deal. It could also be used as a firefighting drone to find hot spots and drop fire suppressants. There are many applications.”
