QADT – Design, Build, Fly
Queen’s Aerospace Design Team (QADT) is a student multidisciplinary engineering organization at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. We are a multidisciplinary team of more than 50 undergraduate students working together to design, build, and test small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for international aerospace competitions.
We are a team of engineering students from a range of disciplines, including mechanical, electrical, software, and aerospace-focused study areas. Our members work together across subteams to turn ideas into real aircraft systems, combining technical skills with hands-on design, testing, and iteration.
QADT designs and builds competition aircraft from concept through flight-ready operation. Our team focuses on:
- Mechanical design and analysis of aircraft structures and components
- Electrical system design, power distribution, and custom PCB development
- Embedded and flight-control systems
- Software for autonomous flight, sensor integration, and control algorithms
- Simulation, testing, and performance optimization for competition aircraft
Through this work, we aim to build high-performance flying vehicles and develop the practical engineering skills needed to solve real aerospace challenges.
This GitHub organization contains the repositories for QADT’s current and past competition teams. It is a software-only organization: the repositories here hold the code and project work for our competition aircraft, and do not contain CAD models or other mechanical design files.
The organization includes:
- Flight controller and embedded firmware
- Autonomy and control software
- Sensor integration and ROS-based software
- Simulation, testing, and validation code
- Competition-specific project repositories
- Documentation and project notes related to software development
This organization reflects the software side of QADT’s engineering work across multiple competition cycles.
For more information, visit the team website: https://qadt.ca/
