Cerberus
Cerberus was a 22.5-ft, dual-stage, dual-payload rocket built to compete in the SRAD 10K Spaceport America Cup, with a N5278 booster that burned out at 2.39 seconds and a L1056 sustainer that burned for 3.84 seconds and reached an apogee of 9,419 ft with a predicted 11,622 feet, using black-powder dual-deployment recovery on both stages to deploy a payload from each at 1500 feet AGL.
Payload 1: SARON
SARON was a 4U CubeSat that was deployed from the sustainer at 1500 feet that used a Raspberry Pi-based sensor suite (GPS, IMU, barometric altimeter, and camera) with a TensorFlow Lite object detection model to identify rocket bodies, vegetation, vehicles, and buildings and report their coordinates, stabilized against post-deployment spin by a PID-controlled steel reaction wheel, and transmitted live image and sensor data to a custom ground control station over a 900 MHz XBee radio link.
Payload 1: SARA
SARA was a quadruped "search and rescue automaton" created by the Capstone Team and deployed from the booster at 1500 feet. Built with a 3D-printed PLA and laser-cut steel frame and four tri-servo articulated legs using a trotting gait for locomotion, controlled by a Raspberry Pi 4B and Arduino Mega with ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance, GPS and magnetometer-based waypoint navigation to locate the downed rocket, and dual-radio communication (LoRa for commands, ham radio for live video) back to the ground station
Avionics Bay
Each stage's recovery coupler housed a dual-redundant altimeter setup with an Altus Metrum EasyMini as the primary and a Featherweight BlueRaven as the secondary, along with a Featherweight GPS tracker. All electronics were mounted on a simplified ABS electronics sled, with drogue deployment set at apogee and main deployment set at 1500 feet AGL.
