Electric Owl soars in student design contests

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Exploring the surface of Mars is a challenge. The robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity gave humans a glimpse of a few square miles of the surface, but what might we learn from a bird’s eye view?

This was the motivation for four electrical engineering students who set out more than a year ago to design a fully automated, redundant flight-control system for an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Team Electric Owl — Jeffrey Bridge, Anthony Austin, Robert Brockman II and Peter Hokanson — spent countless hours building redundant sensor boards and writing thousands of lines of computer code for their autopilot, including a custom-made operating system.

The teamwork paid off in a big way this spring. Team Electric Owl won the $500 prize for best conceptual or computational engineering design project at the 2011 Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Session in April. The team also cleaned up at the Texas Space Grants Consortium’s student-design showcase, where they took top prizes for best video documentation, best next-generation NASA project, best Internet presence for a project, best statement of work and best poster or model demonstration. Electric Owl also took second prize for best oral presentation and they shared the grand prize for Top Design Team with another Rice team, CardiOwls.

Bridge, Austin, Brockman and Hokanson graduated from Rice May 14.