Manta Drone

This project was initiated by MIND, an innovation-driven startup that is linked directly to the Dutch Ministry of Defence. They are always seeking innovative ideas that could improve military operations.

Together with 5 other enthusiastic students, we were given the design brief to create an innovative surveillance drone for water deployment, with some specific requirements like single-operator use, modularity and stealth.

As a team, we dug deeper into the world of military surveillance as well as the diverse existing range of drones. Based on our own research, we concluded that designing a water drone would serve the purpose of the client, but would have a very narrow scope of usefulness. Though water drones have certain advantages over air drones, the opposite can certainly be said as well. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Therefore, we set the ambitious goal of designing a hybrid air-water drone, seeing the benefits that multi-environment use would offer. The main challenges consisted of waterproofing the body, integrating the complete electronics system, and figuring out water-air transitions. A very complex problem, which was fun to work on with a very motivated team and a client who showed great interest.

The end result was a proof-of-concept design that showed that 3D printing a waterproof drone body is possible. Our design showed solutions to the challenges of battlefield producibility, modularity, single operator usability and pleased the client very much.