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IMechE UAS Challenge 2022 & 2021 Grand Champions, producing insanely good UAV designs since 2016


About

We are a group of students based at the University of Surrey consisting of teams focused on competing in the annual IMechE UAS challenge, which sees university teams enter from all over the world. Having won the competition in 2022 and 2021 we have strong experience producing capable autonomous UAV solutions.

You can contact us at teamperyton@surrey.ac.uk


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Team Peryton Heron, Grand Champions 2022

Team Peryton Heron were awarded Grand Champions 2022 at the IMechE UAS challenge, facing 13 international teams at the live competition, as well as gaining the Safety award. This was as a result of performing 2 99% autonomous missions, including successful payload drops.

Heron

from left to right, IMechE President Phil Peel, Oliver Gent, Jonathan Foster, Pierre Semichon, Thanraj Virdee, Owen Wastell.

Heron

Consisting of the remaining 4th year Aria 2021 team as well as students from all years and degrees across the university. We’re building upon our previous success and learning, pushing boundaries across all sub-systems.

Heron

Heron

Interviews & Press

The Team

(click on names for summary)

> Oliver Gent – Team Leader

Oliver led the team throughout the year and pushed development boundaries. He managed objective timelines, motivated the team to progress the project and communicated with stakeholders to report progress and negotiate resources.

> Jonathan Foster – Aerodynamics leader

Jonathan led the aerodynamics team with a focus on designing for autonomous flight by building on the flight characteristics and handling of Aria 3, the previous year’s aircraft, which was a key area of improvement. Following from conceptual design of the aircraft, he headed up work on the autopulot, incorporating design features with the autopilot system resulting in a robust, capable and smooth autonomous aircraft.

> Saurav Tiwari – Structures leader

Working within Team Peryton for the last two years, Saurav has offered his expertise in various fields of UAV design.

> Panayiotis Vyronos – Case leader

The main area of focus for Panos revolved around the payload delivery system. A significant amount of time was also invested in developing and building the UAV case. Being involved in the project has provided him an opportunity to learn about UAV systems and picking up valuable engineering skills and knowledge. Panos is now perusing new career paths in the UAV industry as a result of the experience.

> Pierre Semichon

Pierre developed the image recognition software, in particular the clustering functionality to remove false positives and increase final position estimation.

> Owen Wastell

Owen is a returning member of the 2021 Peryton team. He led the mass tracking within project management. He was also part of the aerodynamics teams for the wing and the structural team for the tail. Team Peryton has been a huge part of his life for the past 2 years. The relationships generated and lessons learnt over that time will be taken with him for the rest of his life.

> Thanraj Virdee

Thanraj is a second-year aerospace engineering student, throughout the course of the year he assisted in the design, manufacture, and testing of the aircraft, helping the team wherever necessary. “This has been a truly amazing experience which has made me more passionate than ever about UAS and I am grateful to the team and the IMechE for this opportunity.”

> Schuyler Goodwin-Groen

Schuyler contributed to the design of the payload bay, fuselage, and wind tunnel testing the propulsion system. He brought expertise in CNC machining, using his custom-built machine, enabling the team to manufacture precise foam fairings. He also assisted in manufacturing the wings, payload bay, nose cone, gaining experience in composite techniques.

> Aiden Wood – Composites

Aiden served as the composites engineer for the team where he helped manufacture the nose cone mould with 3d printing. He promoted the use of flax composite in the project and helped produce a nosecone through the use of wet layup and vacuum bagging.

Luke Bowden, Sam Edmunds, Artie Knijff, Nicholas Siu


2022 Team Peryton Atlantis

We are the third-year team and this will be our first year participating in the UAS Challenge. Our team consists of Aerospace Engineering students and one Mechanical Engineering student. We also have team members returning from industrial placements, bringing with them a plethora of knowledge to apply to this competition. We are keen to demonstrate our engineering abilities and creative thinking which is why we are developing a VTOL aircraft for this year’s competition.

Atlantis

Interviews & Press

We’re Working With

Callen Lenz

QinetiQ

Sponsors

SLEC

3DXR

easycomposites

if you’re interested in what we do, please contact teamperyton@surrey.ac.uk!


Previous entries


2021 Aria, Grand Champion 2021

Aria’s ideology from planning through to testing focused on producing an aircraft capable of winning the competition whilst keeping complexity low. 9 testing days were carried out to ensure the aircraft would perform as expected on the day, going through several design iterations during this process. The team faced many challenges with COVID restrictions but managed to reach their ambitions none the less.

team photo

aria

Interviews & Press

The Team


2021 Dragonfly

The 4th year volunteer team aircraft, designed to be very efficient with tapered high aspect ratio wings and T tail. Innovative use of custom composites to make a structurally light tail boom attachment.

dragonfly


2020 Wally

4th year volunteer team building on the 2019 3rd year group project learning, focusing on producing an easy to manufacture design. Powered by an internal combustion engine and developing the solarfilm/balsa based wing structure which inspired Arias’ wing design. Unfortunately it was unable to enter competition or flight test due to COVID.

wally


2020 Flying Wing

3rd year design project not entered into the IMeche UAS challenge. Developed manufacturing jigs to ease assembly and used custom carbon fibre wrapping to provide an efficient carbon frame.


2019 Flop

I have questions.


2018 Sparky

First Peryton entry to go to competition! Sparky used a CNC’d carbon fibre and aluminium honeycomb sandwich panel to provide an extremely light and stiff frame.


2017 Hudson

First Team Peryton IMechE UAS Challenge entry, designed to use a launcher to save mass on landing gear and propulsion weight. 3 meter high aspect ratio wing ensured high aerodynamic efficiency.


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