About Us

Simurq Aeronautics is a student-led society at the University of Sheffield(United Kingdom). Our objective is to enable young engineers to design and develop manned and unmanned aerospace vehicles. Annually, we field teams in international competitions such as the Institute of Mechanical Engineers' (IMechE) Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Challenge. Two of our teams (Project Hex & Project Volaticus) will be participating at this year's challenge. We aim to finish on the podium.

What We’ve Done

In 2019, two teams represented Simurq Aeronautics for the first time. The independently working teams produced rotary and fixed wing challengers for the competition. 

Project Hex 2019:

Project Volaticus 2019:

Avionics Case

The flight vehicles were developed to achieve autonomous navigation and accurate target identification and discrimination utilising the compact processing capabilities provided by single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi. For astute power management and weight reduction purposes, we developed an avionics case: 

Antenna Tracker

We are currently working on designing our own custom-built antenna tracker that can provide increased flight range. The tracker consists of an STM32 based micro-controller (Blue Pill) as the main controller board and will receive telemetry data from a Raspberry pi board connected to the air vehicle. Here is the current PCB design:

The UAV designs this year have further incorporated PCBs following the successful performance of our custom PDB design, last year:

And More!

We are constantly looking for ways to improve and modularise our electronics designs, whether it is for a proof of concept design or a major flight component. This year we aim to further incorporate standard industrial safety and design practices into our design and development process, and we are looking forward to doing that with PCBWay.

The company's support last year proved to be invaluable in the realisation of our designs. The rapid turnover times allowed for the prompt execution of our test plan. We would welcome the company’s continued support. It gives us a competitive advantage.