Aerospace Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering (or AerosPACE) is a multi-semester, collaborative capstone program that begins every August and ends in April. Boeing initiated this innovative program with a vision of providing real world engineering experience to students. Each team participating in this program must design, build and fly an Unmanned Aircraft System with the capstone project integrated into the curriculum.
Participating students learn about the phase-gate approach, which is implemented by the aerospace industry in the systems engineering design process. University professors and industry experts coach the students during their six interactive design reviews and the student teams come up with their own project schedule in the early stages of this program. This year there were seven teams consisting of approximately 10 students per each team. One of the most important aspects of this program is that each team consists of students from at least three different universities. This teaches students how to collaborate and work with different team members who are located far away. Team members physically see each other twice during the entire program, the first time at the kick off in the month of August and a second time at the fly off in the month of April. Students allocate the leadership roles within each team themselves, and each team collaborated with Everett Community College, WA, to manufacture the main components of the aircraft. Members of each team manufactured the remaining components at their respective locations.
Here is the list of the universities participating in the 2018-2019 AerosPACE program:
- Brigham Young University
- Clemson University
- Georgia Tech
- Iowa State University
- Purdue University
- Tuskegee University
- University of Washington
And for the manufacturing:
- Everett Community College
In all, 86 students were involved in this year’s program. Out of these, 65 students took part in the engineering activities while 21 students from Everett Community College worked on the manufacturing activities.
Here at Dassault Systèmes our Workforce of the Future initiative focuses on working closely with students to introduce them to cutting-edge engineering tools. The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform encompasses comprehensive CAD, CAM and CAE capabilities and also provides powerful solutions for managing collaborative work and joint innovation. Dassault Systèmes sponsors students participating in the AerosPACE program with 3DEXPERIENCE Platform licenses and CATIA, SIMULIA and ENOVIA modules, which help the students collaborate, design and build the Unmanned Aerial Systems.
Florent Salako from Dassault Systèmes mentored students on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform and Relational CAD, while David Martin, also from Dassault Systèmes, helped students with the simulation applications.
This year the fly off was scheduled at John’s Island near Charleston, SC on April 12.
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