Backgrounder: New scholarship fund for UVic grad students

UVic’s Centre for Aerospace Research

In the five years since its inception in 2013, the University of Victoria’s Centre for Aerospace Research (CfAR) has become a Canadian leader in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) research, design and flight testing. UAS encompass everything including the ground station communications, on-board payloads and autopilot systems, as well as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) itself.

Grad students, including a number of international students, are involved at all levels of research at CfAR from conceptualization and prototyping, to manufacturing and flight testing.

CfAR-developed UAVs, and customized payloads are currently undergoing design and testing for a wide variety of applications, such as search and rescue, disaster response, mining exploration using remote sensing technology, environmental and wildlife monitoring, agriculture and telecommunications.

The centre is led by Canada Research Chair and centre director Afzal Suleman of UVic's Faculty of Engineering. The CfAR team includes a Principal Investigator and Director and two associate engineering faculty, and currently there are 10 engineers, 4 Postdoc, 15 graduate and 8 undergrad students being trained in this emerging field.

In Canada, some of the centre's industrial and government partners include Bombardier Aerospace, Department of National Defence, Qinetiq Training Systems Canada and the National Research Council and national Universities such as UBC, SFU and Toronto. Internationally, CfAR has been collaborating with Boeing (USA), Embraer (Brazil); and several universities in Europe and USA.