SAETA UC3M - SUAS Project

This project is under the lead of SAETA UC3M, the aerospace and aeromodelling association of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain). SAETA brings together students from different engineering disciplines to design, manufacture and test unmanned aerial systems. Our current flagship project is the development of an autonomous aircraft for participation in the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) Competition. Furthermore, other projects have been developed in order to learn more about UAVs, going to regional competitions such as the XtraChallenge during the last three years.

Over the last year, our team has designed and built several UAV platforms to gain experience in autonomous flight, avionics integration and computer vision. We are currently developing a new aircraft featuring a complete embedded electronics stack, including a flight controller, companion computer based on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano platform, onboard vision systems, custom electronic modules and supporting hardware.

You can see two of the prototypes developed for this project.

The next natural step for this project is the development and integration of the embedded electronics required to accomplish the competition objectives. This includes designing a dedicated hardware system for the autonomous payload release mechanism, allowing the UAV to accurately drop humanitarian aid during rescue missions after detecting the target through computer vision.

In parallel, we are integrating the onboard electronics that will support the AI inference pipeline on the NVIDIA Jetson platform, the autopilot, and the sensor processing subsystem. These custom PCBs will provide a compact, reliable, and maintainable hardware architecture for the aircraft.

The project combines aerospace engineering, embedded systems, electronics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. Students are involved in every stage of the development process, from CAD design and PCB development to firmware programming, AI deployment, and flight testing.

Support from PCBWay would enable us to develop more efficient and reliable electronic systems for our autonomous aircraft and unmanned aerial systems. We are excited about the opportunity to collaborate with PCBWay and achieve our goals through their support while inspiring the next generation of aerospace engineers.