Hyperion: An International Collaboration

The Hyperion aircraft project was an international collaboration to develop an aerial vehicle to investigate new technologies with a focus on performance efficiencies. A delocalized international team of graduate and undergraduate students conceived, designed, implemented, and operated the aircraft. The project taught essential systems engineering skills through long-distance design and manufacturing collaborations with multidisciplinary teams of students located around the world. Project partners are the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, The University of Sydney, Australia, and the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The three teams are distributed eight hours apart; students can relay select work daily so that developments can "Follow-The-Sun". Select components are manufactured and integrated both in Stuttgart and Colorado, giving the students an opportunity to learn multifaceted design tactics for manufacturing and interface control. Final flight testing was conducted by the global team in Colorado during the month of April 2011.