This summer, I was thrilled to get the chance to work at Ascent Aerosystems, a small company that manufactures coaxial UAVs. Coaxial UAVs are more mechanically complex than a quadcopter, so I was able to gain more experience in mechanical design and fabrication while also applying one of my main interests and hobbies (drones) in a work setting.

While at Ascent, I was given a wide variety of tasks, from design and fabrication work to technical documentation, and flight testing to 3D printer maintenance. It was exciting to explore a variety of work and gain insight into many different jobs, and I was fortunate to have very helpful and knowledgeable mentors from whom I learned a lot.

One of my primary projects at Ascent was revising build documentation for a new release of one of their products. This involved examining small changes to some components and documenting how these small changes affected manufacturing, assembly, and testing of a product. This was especially interesting to me as most of my work in previous internships and at college had been prototype design, where manufacturability and testing were less of a concern.

While my role was primarily mechanical, I also gained valuable experience with electrical and radio systems. One of the projects I worked on involved configuring and integrating an LTE control and video downlink for a prototype UAV. While not something I had done before, it was very interesting to explore this field and satisfying to see a functional result.

I greatly enjoyed my time as Ascent Aerosystems this summer!