Drone Design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

From 2022 to present, I have worked on a small team at LLNL specializing in designing custom novel drone platforms from the ground up. We are an unusual team at this lab in that we move extremly rapidly through the prototype to product cycle, we design end user products for mass manufacturing, and we have a machine shop that is used by engineers.

The photos and descriptions I can share are extremly limited due to the cleared nature of the work. Broadly, we design unmanned ariel and unmanned ground vehicles to support a multitude of sensors, primarily ground penetrating radar. These drones do NOT carry weapons. As a designer, my role has been to transition an R&D platform to a ruggadized drone that can be dissasmbled and packed with little training. Working on aircraft, ultra light weight design that maintains electrical robustness and waterproofing has been critical.

I have touched every part of this mechanical design, and put a lot of thought into how every componant can be keyed and assembled so that it can not be assembled incorrectly and is easy to repair when parts break. I have also worked to balance making designs that we are capable of producing in small batches in our lab but that will be able to be scaled for manufacturing when the time comes. I work directly with the end user at feild events, and interview them to get feedback on the design.