Phantum - Theseus

Theseus is our first project in our path towards making a fully-reusable, student-built supersonic UAV.

Theseus is our debut aircraft. It will serve as a test platform for all our aircraft systems. For this reason, it was built with modularity and low price in mind.

Software

Among others, we also expect to use this aircraft extensively to train our AI Flight Computer, which will then be used for future Valkyrie Missions. A big part of this is the automatic landing system we are working on, which would enable much higher landing speeds for future projects

Our Modularity

The aircraft is made to accommodate a very wide variety of payloads. It has ample internal volume for additional systems, and the large wings and excess thrust allow it to take off with much heavier configurations. Additionally, the aircraft has an innovative wing box design, which allows the movement of the wing in between flights. This provides us with an additional degree of freedom to balance the aircraft aerodynamically if the payload will change the center of mass or if we are testing different airfoil configurations.

Construction

To keep costs low and production simple, the aircraft will be 3d printed out of . However, we will be testing our manufacturing technologies and processes to gain more experience for future UAV development.

Systems

We will use Theseus to extensively test our systems to ensure a robust, compact and reliable system architecture. Theseus gives us the opportunity to develop and optimize our long range communication system, advanced sensor suite and avionics. All of which will be later used on further aircraft, all to ensure a safe and rapid test environment.