Butane Rocket

For my MEAM 2480 lab course my team designed and calibrated a butane bottle rocket that had to hit a target at an unknown distance while flying through a gap with both the target range and the gap's position revealed only on test day. The launcher had just two controllable inputs, butane mass and launch angle, so the problem reduced to finding the pair that put the trajectory through a specific point in space and landed it on the target. We ran a series of calibration launches across the full usable range of masses and angles, recording not just where each shot landed but how high it was passing several fixed downrange gates, which gave us the shape of the trajectory rather than only its endpoint. From that data we built an empirical model of the launcher that was embedded in a web app that took the launch day specifications and returned the launch settings. For our model we choose to heavily rely on empirical data rather than  a physics model since drag and the unsteady thrust phase made purely theoretical predictions unreliable. On test day we cleared the gap, landed on target, and finished fifth in the class, one of only five teams to make it through the gap in a single try.