Student Bio
Marc-Antoine Leclerc has a passion for aeronautics and aerial robotics and has completed his undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in aeronautics at the University of Sherbrooke in 2019. In the last two years of his undergraduate studies, for his Major Design Project, he was part of a team of 21 students in Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering to convert a two-seat aircraft (KR2) powertrain from a combustion engine to a fully electric propulsion (HERA Project). His tasks during the project were the design, FEA analysis, and fabrication of a new engine mount to support all the powertrain (i.e., electric motor, inverter, batteries, and cooling), which follows Transport Canada RAC load case guidelines to be as light as possible. He learned during this project to assemble custom made battery pack and participated with two other team members to design and assemble a 100kW electric powertrain static testbench. He then tested the testbench at l’ÉNA in Saint-Hubert to analyze the overall performances and efficiency. During his undergraduate studies and up to this day, he has assembled and modified various types of small custom remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), such as, motorized gliders, flying wings, racing quads, hexacopters, with PixHawk autopilot systems and live first person view (FPV) video transmission. This gave him good hands-on experienced with the necessary components and control used to fly RPAS and an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the different configurations (e.g., fixed-wing vs rotary wing).
During his undergraduate studies, he has completed three internships with his current supervisor’s – Professor Alexis Lussier Desbiens – research lab to work on various RPAS research projects. During two internships, he assisted a graduate student in his research on quadcopter landing on inclined surface using reverse thrust. His last internship was to design and test a compact portable simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system using a scanning lidar for 3D mapping and mounted it on an existing RPAS to map underground mining sites.
He then chose to pursue his Master of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering under the supervision Professor Lussier Desbiens. In partnership with surveying firm Corriveau J.L., his master’s research is a continuation of his last internship but aimed to design and test a fully custom-built quadcopter optimized to navigate and map underground mine stopes using the SLAM technique. The RPAS must be able to carry the necessary equipment for SLAM navigation while being limited in power and being smaller than commercially available platforms. This research project touches various fields, such has rotorcraft and propeller aerodynamics, dynamic modeling, control, and composite fabrication and is done in collaboration with other graduate students in the Computer and Electrical engineering departments.