Bell Flight, formerly Bell Helicopter, has a lot going on in the area of designing and developing innovative vertical lift aircraft in the commercial sector (such as the Bell APT or the Bell Nexus), and especially in the military sector with the future of vertical lift aircraft (The V-280 Valor and the 360 Invictus). I personally am happy to get to work as a design engineer on the production version of the V-280 Valor.

Me grinning in front of the V-280 Valor air vehicle concept demonstrator aircraft.

During this exciting time, Bell is highly invested in raising up the next-generation of engineers and scientific thinkers to join the effort of advancing vertical lift technology into the future. A key component of this effort is the Bell Vertical Robotics Competition.

Every year, high-schools across Texas (and expanding rapidly to additional states), compete against one another to design, build, test, and present a vertical-lift drone that they have developed to accomplish a set of unique physical challenges presented to them. The competition is different each year and conducted inside a safety screened-in area.

This screened-in “drone cage” is roughly 15′ x 40′ and 15′ tall. The frame is set out in an approximate 15′ interval to suspend the screen above the area as well as along the sides. See the photos below to get a better idea of this structure.

(Photos below and more can be found at the Bell Vertical Robotics Competition website)

This drone cage is actually quite difficult to set up. It take a two-man team over six hours to set up and involved using special scissor-lift equipment to raise personnel high enough to connect the joints at the top of the cage. Rohn Olson, a Senior Tech Fellow at Bell and key sponsor of the Bell drone competition, saw this set-up method as an area for improvement. He approached me with his idea to make the drone cage much easier to set up. In fact, the design is projected to only require a single person to set up with no special equipment required at all. Rohn asked me to provide a visualization, a sort of three-dimensional mock-up and kinematic, of his design. I eagerly agreed.

Below are some of the engineering design visualizations I created to communicate Rohn’s design and support the important work of the Bell Vertical Lift Competition.

Rohn’s design eliminates the hard-to-reach joints in the center section of the cage and instead uses lange, angled members to allow for a single person on the ground to rotate the end wall up into place and pin it to the frame on the ground. By placing the net around the structure to begin with, cables in tension between the back and front walls allow for the entire structure to come together in much less time than the existing method.

I thoroughly enjoyed the creative process of working iteratively with Rohn to accurately communicate his engineering design.