Drones Practicing Mechanics

Mechanics of materials is a traditional engineering course that exposes undergraduate students in a variety of engineering fields to the principles of strain and stress analysis. However, material deformation and strain have been evaluated theoretically, numerically, and empirically tested using expensive machinery and instruments. This paper describes a novel method for analyzing strain and deformation using quadrotors. We propose to treat quadrotors as a finite number of particles of a deformable body and apply the principles of continuum mechanics to illustrate the concept of axial and shear deformation in 2-D and 3-D motion spaces. The outcome from this work has the potential to significantly impact undergraduate education by bridging the gap between classroom instruction and hardware implementation and experiments using quadrotors. Therefore, we introduce a new role for quadrotors as "teachers," which provides an excellent opportunity to practice theoretical concepts of mechanics in a productive way.