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Tell us about your society. You must use the following subheadings:

The idea- (A academic society) A UAV society based around the IMechE challenge as a core focus, with ability to expand into a longer term designs and have multiple projects running at the same time. 

The ambition of the society- To win the IMechE challenge, and create infrastructure for long term designs and train first year students about practical engineering similar to LURA.

2-3 objectives of the society-

1- Win the IMechE challenge of the year 2026.

2- Develop infrastructure and design processes that we can teach new people each year.

3- Establish more cross society connections with other academic societies. 

The types of activities we would like to run:

Design and manufacturer of a UAV, socials in the university, fundarising, and sponsorships. 

Your availability to attend a formation workshop/meeting

I'm available always on Friday morning and Wednesday afternoon. However, i don't know when you run these events. 

Anything else of interest or to consider

As last year, we partook in the challenge; however, we ran into issues of limited budget, people not knowing we exist and thus not joining us, and limited access to university facilities. So this year, the reason we wish to start the society is to be able to:

Have greater access to more university rooms and facilities, similar to LURA. Being a society will make us more official and allow us to go through the more official pipelines to book rooms and use the equipment the university offers. Last year, we used the HELIX for manufacturing and design processes. However, this year we wish to be able to access more rooms for meetings and designing. 

Increasing our funding, the union offers grants and funding for societies to make their projects. This will be useful, as last year we had a limited budget and thus were significantly limited in our design options. 

Greater presence in the university, currently we have very limited ability to let people know we exist, with access to freshers fairs and advertisement through Engage, which will give us a greater ability to promote ourselves around the university, allowing people interested in us to find out about what we do. 

Get more variety in students who are non-engineers. We currently have nearly only engineers in our team; we wish to get a greater variety of skills. Access to Engage, freshers, and official stats in the university will let more people know we exist, and thus, we can prompt more non-engineers. 

Cross-society links, LURA and AVSOC are ideal societies to do events with and having ourselves be a society will allow us to more easily do socials and events with other societies. 

How we differ from LURA and AVSOC.

1- LURA is a rocketry-based society with a focus on space engineering, designing their rockets to reach the Karman line. We are a UAV society focused on the IMechE challenge and drone building for application in agriculture and humanitarian aid, with the goal of expanding our engineering team to have longer-term multi-year designs. We are different as we focus on two completely different forms of aero engineering, requiring their own specific skills and designs. Rocket science and aircraft design are very different processes, attracting different types of people. Both societies attract engineers, but we have 35 people who currently want to design aircraft and not rockets, which shows there is a definite gap which is being filled.

AVSOC, I (Edward Jones, the person writing this) am the AVSOC secretary and can definitively say we cover very different aspects of aviation and aerial vehicles. AVSOC is focused on piloting and flying with trips to airfields, hangars, and flying lessons. Whereas the arrows are focused on UAV design and have a much greater engineering focus. 

Similar societies in other universities.

https://www.instagram.com/uom_uav/, Manchester University UAV society, which also enters the IMechE. 

https://www.instagram.com/teambathdrones/, a Bristol-based group designing UAVs for the IMechE.