Dr. Zairil has a B.Eng in Aerospace Engineering from Liverpool University, UK (1996). He also has a PhD in Automatic Flight Control System from Southampton University, UK (2000) where he worked on an active automatic flight control system for a NASA published hypothetical Hypersonic Aircraft. Dr. Zairil was an academician for 8 years, teaching courses such as Control Systems, Aircraft Stability and Control, Automatic Flight Control Systems, Product Innovation and a few more. He has had the experience of teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate courses as well as conducting government sponsored research programs which resulted in publications in international journals and conferences. The highlight of his UAV research during his days as academician was when he presented his work at the AUVSI Conference in Singapore in 2008. The response from the attendees was encouraging, and promptly invited by the organiser to be the forum panel. His passion with UAV started in the year 2000. Dr. Zairil started a Malaysian government sponsored UAV program from scratch. He secured funding, set up the infrastructure, built up a team, fabricate their own UAVs, and flew them unmanned successfully. 8 years later, the program matured and ready for commercialization. In 2008 he left the academic world and commercialized UAV products and services through his 2 companies, Advanced EduTech Enterprise and Asmara Aerospace Sdn. Bhd.. His companies are now serving organisations around the world such as the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Saudi and the Nigerian Air Force, Nigeria. Dr. Zairil is a firm believer of, and practices “Fly-Savely’ UAV policy. He championed flying UAV in civil airspace by proving and educating the team and the authorities such as the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA), Malaysia on how to share common airspace. The UAVs built and flew by his team has successfully shared common airspace since 2004. The vision was to open and promote Civil UAV industry services to the public, at that time. Dr. Zairil’s passion in engineering and technology, is utilizing theories of engineering and applying them to the real world. His background in Aerospace helped him to ‘think’ multi-disciplinary – with the end goal in mind. It’s a tool useful in merging, say, technologies from composite materials and laws from automatic flight control systems. This is one of the useful skills he utilized when programming Control Laws into UAV autopilot systems to predict it’s effects on the overall aircraft flight performance. During his academic days, Dr. Zairl was a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE), UK and a registered Chartered Engineer (C.Eng) with the UK Board of Engineers. Now, he manages the 2 startup companies, and commonly partners up with local research institutions and institutions of higher learning to make projects a great success. Dr Zaludin teaches the UAV Autopilot Theroy and Design Course for Unmanned Vehicle University.
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