In Project Collisions, I am creating a system to deliver Diarrhea Pepto Chewable Tablets. The drone will release the package from a height up to 10 meters and my job as an engineer is to develop a solution so that the package is protected in its fall.
For Drop 0, a package with the dimensions of 11.9 x 5 x 2.5 was dropped from a height of 5 meters. Below is a photograph of the package:

The package will hold the chewable pills but we put markers and erasers to imitate the weight of the chewable. Inside, items are organized like this:

The purpose of Drop 0 is to get baseline data about our package. The group developed a testing procedure so that we can be consistent on how data is collected throughout the design cycle.

During the drops, I noticed that when our package dropped there was not a lot of force because our package was small and. was light so soft landing might not be an issue. The following data was collected:

The average time it took for our package to fall the 5 meters was about 0.9353 seconds. Using LoggerPro, we plotted out the fall of the package.


The fall was a bit slow at the start but started to accelerate at the middle part and stayed about at a constant speed after it accelerated
A force plate at the bottom of the drop was used to collect data on the impact force of the package. Our group hit the target 1 out of 3 times which I don’t think is very good. As a project metric for accuracy, we want our project to try to hit the target more often so that the package won’t be lost.
The average force on impact was 37.3 N because that was the only time we hit the force plate. As a project metric, our group has decided to maybe try to lower it to make it as soft as possible but maybe not.
Summary: Project Metrics
Our team has decided that the three most important criteria to design towards are Accuracy, Soft landing and big quantities. Below, each metric is described and the goals were determined by data from Drop 0.
- Metric 1: Being able to hit the target more than 50 percent of the time, maybe more than 75
- Metric 2: The package having a soft landing so that the things inside don’t break. Reducing the force by 25 percent.
- Metric 3: We want to have more things inside so that the people using it would have more supplies to use rather than needing to keep getting it and maybe run out quickly.
Our group is now building the first prototype. I hope that we put like a outer shell thing to protect the package and maybe if it works a parachute but if it glides away then maybe not.
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