RENO, Nev. (KOLO) – For a group of four University of Nevada, Reno engineering students, the last six months have meant long nights and plenty of hours in the lab—building a drone designed to lift as much weight as possible.
“There were thousands of hours that went into this,” said undergraduate engineering student Owen Kirpes. “There were days in this lab where we were in here until 3 a.m. and we started at noon.”
Kirpes and fellow undergraduate Cash Walker are working with graduate students Matthew Goecker and Christopher Mengu, under the guidance of faculty advisor Professor Hao Xu. Their goal: win a national competition where the only scoring metric is payload capacity compared to the drone’s own weight…