Imagine a rover landing on the surface of Mars.
What if drones emerged from the spacecraft to explore the landscape?
Those unmanned aerial vehicles need to be designed, built and flight tested.
That’s the assignment for as many as 20 Everett Community College students starting this fall.
The college is being asked to be a part of a prestigious program that taps college students to build drones for real-world — or in this case, out-of-this-world — scenarios.
The second-year EvCC students will work in teams with students from several other colleges around the country. They’ll be supervised by faculty but also work directly with mentors from Boeing and NASA as well as other companies.
“We coach them, but we don’t tell them what to do,” said Barry McPherson, a Boeing Learning, Training and Development leader.
At the end of the school year, the students will come together in a central location to fly their creations in front of these engineers and executives.
“It’s not something you can get out of,” said Michael Richey, an Associate Technical Fellow at Boeing. “You actually have to fly a vehicle and you have to fly it in front of industry people.”
Students who have gone through the program in past years have been offered jobs, obtained patents and sold their ideas to aerospace companies.
“My senior project, nobody was knocking on my door to pay me money for it,” said Mike Vander Wel, Boeing Commerical Airplanes Production Engineering Chief Engineer. “I think that speaks to the quality of what’s coming out of here.”
Everett Community College is the first community college to be asked to be a part of the program — called Aerospace Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering or AerosPACE.
“It is huge for us,” said Sheila Dunn, EvCC’s associate dean of Aerospace and Advanced Manufacturing. “It really is a major accomplishment and a result of some really hard work to bring our manufacturing programs together in an interdisciplinary model.”
Boeing started the program in 2010 to draw students into the aerospace industry, which needs to replace a huge wave of retiring engineers and other workers.
“It’s an opportunity to get great kids to come work for Boeing,” Richey said. “That’s the why.”
There is an overall theme each year. Two years ago, students were tasked with building drones that could help improve crop yield. Last year, it was building drones to respond in a disaster area.
Under those themes, students get to choose a challenge — called a request for proposal, to use industry language. One of those challenges last year was to build a drone that could fly a defibrillator to a disaster scene.
This year, with NASA becoming a partner, the theme is the exploration of space. The individual challenges are still being decided upon. Industry partners include Siemens, edX, Stratasys and CD-adapco.
How the teams create their drones is completely up to them. One team last year built a drone that was made completely from a 3D printer.
“They have complete control over what is created,” EvCC’s Dunn said. “Each of the teams designs their own drone so they can be really any size.”
The students are given cost and schedule constraints. “It’s not like school — here’s your lesson, here’s your five things you need to do,” Richey said. “It’s not like that.”
And the students will get access to working engineers through online lectures and direct contact.
“Kids who didn’t know they were engineers, we’ll make engineers out of them,” Richey said.
In addition to EvCC, the colleges that are expected to participate include Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Tuskegee University, Brigham Young University, Clemson University, University of Southern California, San Diego, and Saint Louis University.
All of the students are brought together — at Boeing’s expense — to meet and be paired off with each other. The East Coast students will gather in September in Atlanta. The West Coast students will gather in Utah.
From those colleges, 10 teams will be put together. Each team will be comprised of students from different colleges, meaning that students need to collaborate long distance.
“That really mimics what we do here in Boeing and any industry,” McPherson said.
Richey and McPherson would like to see two EvCC students on each team. The four-year students will be engineering majors while the EvCC students have manufacturing experience.
“That’s really how we do things,” Richey said. “If you look at any company, you have your technicians and technologists who work alongside the engineers.”
At the end of the year, the students will all gather together for an event called a “Fly Off.” Last year, it was in Utah. It hasn’t been decided where the Fly Off will this year.
Boeing officials contacted EvCC and asked the college to participate in the program after touring the college’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Education Center or AMTEC, which opened last year. The center brings together all the pieces of manufacturing from designing a product to manufacturing it and testing it to even recycling it.
With the opening of the center, EvCC students built drones for the first time last year as part of a couple of classes. The center allows students to see the entire production process occur under one roof.
“One of the keys we here all the time from industry is they want their engineers exposed to real-world manufacturing and breaking down the silos in the manufacturing process,” said John Bonner, the college’s vice president of Corporate and Workforce Training.
Vander Wel, McPherson and Richey said they were impressed with the center.
Boeing has had a long and fruitful relationship with the college, Richey said, The college is also doing some exciting things with AMTEC, Richey said.
“They’re very innovative,” Richey said. “They’re trying to do new things. They understand the value of experiential learning.”
McPherson likened it to going into another person’s garage and seeing how well organized it is.
“We looked at other colleges,” McPherson said. “(Everett Community College) seemed to be much more mature in their program and further along in their infrastructure than others.”
Building the drones will be a class at EvCC each quarter worth five credits, Dunn said. EvCC is working with a professor from Brigham Young University to develop the criteria needed to apply for the program.
“We really like students who take risks,” Dunn said. “Ones who aren’t afraid to not succeed. It won’t be entirely based on GPA.”
Watching the students learn and grow from the program is part of the excitement. “These kids don’t drop out of this,” Richey said. “Kids that you don’t think would be at the top emerge from this.”
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