RCA Ernest Annau Scholarship Reportrca-arc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ernestAnnauReport_jakeRead… · a drone of my own design. Although this has been a travelling study the main

RCAErnest Annau ScholarshipReportA DRONE FOR THE CITYTOOLS FOR THE ARCHITECTJAKE READJANUARY 9th 2015

2 E r n E s t A n n A u s c h o l A r s h i p r E p o r t

this report was prepared for

The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts

by Jake Read for the

Ernest Annau Scholarship

and submitted on the

12th of January 2015

the scholarship was awarded in April of 2014

this report discusses works dating back to September 2012

the culminating activity took place in December and January of 2014 / 2015

a d r o n e f o r t h e c i t y 3


I set out to photograph the city as seen from above with a drone of my own design. Although this has been a travelling study the main points I want to make are about craft, process and the architect as a tool-builder. The travel spanned seven days but the preparation leading up has lasted much longer, and this, also, was where I made most of my discoveries.

I have explored the craft surrounding the construction of small aerial vehicles - I will argue that this is an exercise similar to the construction of buildlings, but not in scale - and this has led to reflection on the future of an architect’s digital tool-set. I also engaged the city with the eyes of a drone, and I would like to make an analogy between the spatial engagement of a human in a building, and a drone in the city.

I should also admit that I am drawn to this ‘study’ in a purely childish way. I have always loved the thought of flying; this is a desire which is as basic to mas as is my desire to build. I have felt it since I was a child and I do not imagine it will go away. Why I chose for my education the construction of firmly-mounted buildings is occasionally a mystery to me, but more often than not I see a strong harmony between the two desires.

Finally, I have begun to see - somewhat to my surprise - a popular awareness of drones and their accessibility to ‘laymen’. The excitement around drones now, in 2015, is similar to the excitement around 3D printing which seems to have peaked in 2013. I think the ties between these two things is also stronger than it may seem; and I want to go more into this later on.

The work accumulated here is, more than it may appear, a result of about two years of tinkering, practice and reflection. Needless to say it has rarely gone in a straight line. I have built and crashed over 20 aircraft, and drawn up many more.

Opening Statement


I often felt that this work was ‘outside’ of my academic curriculum, and so I have been hesitant to engage fully in it, though I cherished it so. I feel that after completing this particular phase of the project, I now have an appropriate juncture to disengage with the practice of drone-building, and I am glad for the Ernest Annau Scholarship to have given me the chance to engage in it more wholly before doing so. Even the act of writing this report has been an incredibly worthwhile reflection on my time with the work.

After what seems like so long a time (two years, half of my undergraduate career, probably the majority of my ‘practicing’ years so far) I see now where these loves of architecture and aircraft come together, and I am eager to chase after that line as I continue my studies.


I believe that as we push into an architecture where new invention is paramount if not necessary and while we look to improve the quantifiable performance of our buildings alongside their incalculable effects as human artefacts, we cannot ignore the importance of digital tools. Engagement with digital craft changes a design to such an extent that the architect must now become the designer of these tools, not only the masters of their use. Today’s digital tools have risen far beyond simple drafting aides and challenge us to engage with an entirely new craft.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this study has largely been a study of these tools. I would say the design and assembly of a drone is fundamentally similar to that of a building (but I have to pledge limited experience in the second case). In either case we have a number of things which we need to put together, some can be modeled mathematically and ‘optimized’ but the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts - and to put them all together at once requires some real intuition. In both cases there are the components, which we must refine and study, and their functions - circulation or power delivery, HVAC or computer control - but no particular piece can be entirely de-coupled from the rest of the design, and the designer is left to handle them simultaneously. The actual ‘thing’ which we construct is by no means found in the components: it is in their thoughtful assembly. In both cases the designer is challenged to find harmony between the pieces: a process which I always think of as a kind of play. The intersection I spoke of earlier - between the craft of architecture and the design of aircraft, is in the digital work-spaces where they are born. In spending my time designing and building these aircraft I was constantly engaged in the practice of tool-building. In this way I hoped to discover what a digital work-space for the next architect may look like.

Notes on Design


8 E R N E S T A N N A U S C H O L A R S H I P R E P O R T

I would like now to offer a small discussion on the design of aircraft in order to later present my discoveries regarding the toolset. I should preface this with a note that I am by no means a professional, and these opinions are built on a self-taught practice. Nontheless;

Being winged, aircraft are trickier to design than a quadcopter: they require some balancing. If you can imagine, there are a number of forces acting on an aircraft at any given time: and these forces change constantly. We have lift and drag, weight and thrust, and momentary (rotational) forces. Traditionally the designer’s desire is to confi gure an aircraft so that it is ‘neutrally stable’ - so that all of these forces balance one another out. We also look for dynamic stability - a confi guration where, when the craft is knocked out of a stable state, it naturally returns to that stable state without any pilot input. These requirements have to be met mathematically, and they can be modelled mathematically - so it is not so much of an intutive problem. The trouble comes when something simple - like ‘where does the camera go’ - interrupts these balances. Also to consider is the construction of the craft, the structure required to carry the aerodynamic loads, costs, electronic control systems and so on. This is what I mean by the ‘play’ of the thing: we juggle options and re-calculate, hold a number of decisions in states of possibility. We try to reach as far down the decision-tree as we can, and by some work of intuition come to a design choice.

In my practice, I’ve been building a digital tool-set in Rhino / Grasshopper to help with the math required to calculate these balances. This way I can engage in the design through drawing and modeling, more or less free-hand, but see the mathematic results of my decision as I do so. While I re-arrange components I see the center of gravity shift. When I change the shape of a wing I see where the center of lift moves, how the total lift is affected, and how much drag the wing generates. In this playful way, I gain a sense for the available design space intuitively, and I can wander more openly around it. One of the more interesting things I have discovered with the use of these tools is that with continued use I am


submitted to learning the way the mathematics behave as I make rational and irrational decisions. After some practice with the tools, I now have a sense of how big a wing may need to be to carry certain components. I understand immediately how changing the size of a payload from 100-300 grams rolls through into weight gains in structure and power supply.

While many would say that the new digital drafting board is hindering intuition, I hope that we will see an emergence of these tools which allow the designer to engage highly technical problems with an intuitive hand. The computer is able to provide a wealth of information for the designer - as they draw - although we rarely see it done in a straightforward way. To build out a digital craft which is informative as it is intuitive would be a worthwhile exercise, and this is where I hope to take my own studies.

Imagine the simplicity of sketch-modelling (charette, cut-and-paste models of spaces, buildlings). When we have a material at hand to bend and tear we understand immediately it’s limits and possibilities. We learn from it and eventually this knowledge becomes engrained in our intuition. But this kind of learn-as-you-go experience is not yet present in the digital realm. To design well with modern materials and tools requires years of experience as a result; the intuition only comes after so many cycles. This example of material understanding is just one of many - the same thing happens with the arrangement of spaces and the environment they imply, or the way a building faces a street to build out a city, or how an HVAC system crawls through a building to save space or add efficiency. In most cases it takes the years-long cycle from design to construction for an architect to truly understand the result of their design choices. On the computer we now have simulation powerful enough to mimic these effects, and virtual reality to experience it. Strong analytic and optimization tools are already built-in to many engineering softwares, the trouble now is to make their complicated languages as accessible as the sketchpad.

1 0 E r n E s t A n n A u s c h o l A r s h i p r E p o r t

A small quadcopter, carried fully-assembled in a backpack. Capable of vertical ascent but range-limited to a kilometer at most. Due to it’s low mass, challenged in windy conditions. Built with 2.5mm aircraft plywood.

The 250 Quad

a d r o n e f o r t h e c i t y 1 1

A. Brushless MotorsB. 5” Diameter PropellersC. Electronic Motor ControllerD. 2.4GHz Controls RecieverE. Arduino-based Flight Control BoardF. Lithium Polymer BatteryG. Power Distribution board


A 550mm wingspan aircraft with a single propeller, carrying the same camera as the 250-size quadcopter. Remote or auto-piloted to a 5 or 6 kilometer radius. Capable of hovering while oriented vertically, using the same basic stabilization principles as the quadcopter.

Frame is laser-cut aircraft plywood with carbon fibre spars, wings are milled foam and covered in silkspan.

Ernest Aircraft 550mm



A 1500mm wingspan variant of the same essential design as left. Longer wingspan and a bigger aspect ratio (similar to that of a glider’s) for a projected range of 20km or more. At this range (and speeds past 120km/h) trips across some cities are possible.

Ernest Aircraft 1500mm



I think the creation of the drone is also, in some far-off way, an act of architecture. The drone gives us new eyes, and looking is the first step towards building. Only in the last 110 years have we begun to see our city from above, and this view is now available at our fingertips in the plan-form. But there is something deeply unsatisfying about this plan view in a kind of raw sense. We do not stare onto it as we stare out of the plane window. We do not engage with a map the same way we engage with a space. This comes from a difference in agency.

A visitor to a building experiences the space wholly, and their ability to move within it is paramount to the experience. The drone is the tool which would open this active, spatial experience of the whole city to the masses who inhabit it. To fly around with the eyes of a drone is a different experience than the plan-view we now have access to. We can engage with the city spatially - we move around in it, and we have a presence there.

To finish with tools; the 3D printers made popular a few years ago are now often used in the contruction of drones. I believe much of the excitement around 3D printing is rooted in an excitement to engage with the built world - I think that drone-building does the same thing for the engagement to the city where we reside. Then the tool is at the heart of it all: our ability to build, our ability to see and to engage. This is what the architect does, and I am hopeful that this is what we all will be able to do, in varying degrees, in the near future.

I present now the operation and observations over seven days of a ‘250-size’ (250mm rotor-to-rotor dimension) quadcopter within three cities: Marsaille, Genoa, and Venice.

Flying in the City



Ideally the quadcopter can be launched just about anywhere - but these drones tend towards unreliable and safety of residents and property is important. I chose large open spaces with lots of room for error, and ideally low occupation. The following pages display the results of and the physical equipment used during operation.

Operation


The 250mm Quadcopter

Transmitter, Video Reciever and Goggles

Batteries & Chargers


Emergency Tools

Spare Parts

Adhesives and Re-Assembly


Flight Control Board Tuning and Configuring


Unlike most american cities, in Europe the Quadcopter was often met with joy and wonder. Even some police officers seemed more interested than concerned with the operation of the drone, although I think the small scale of this particular craft contributed largely to that attitude.

Public Reception


2 4 E R N E S T A N N A U S C H O L A R S H I P R E P O R T

Marsaille



Genoa



Venice




A DRONE FOR THE CITYTOOLS FOR THE ARCHITECTJAKE READJANUARY 9th 2015

Documents

RCA Ernest Annau Scholarship Reportrca-arc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ernestAnnauReport_jakeRead… · a drone of my own design. Although this has been a travelling study the main