UCI UAV Forge Drone Team Places First in U.S.

Sept. 30, 2026 – UC Irvine’s UAV Forge team placed first in the U.S. for the second year in a row for mission demonstration at the RoboNation Student Unmanned Aerials Systems (SUAS) competition. Eleven members of the team traveled to Tulsa, Okahoma to compete in the SUAS competition from September 14 to 17, where they also placed sixth globally out of 64 teams.

"It's really wonderful to see the team's continued success at international competitions because they deserve recognition for their hard work and incredible collaboration as a large and interdisciplinary team,” said their advisor Associate Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering David Copp. “Our engineering students at UCI are outstanding." 

The competition evaluates teams on their ability to design, integrate, and operate an autonomous unmanned aerial system through a series of mission tasks. This year’s theme of disaster response required the drone to fly and map an area, navigate waypoints, avoid obstacles, detect a tent and mannequin and perform two precise payload drops.

The UCI drone, Widow, was designed, built and integrated by six student sub teams. The aircraft team designed and constructed the entire drone. The avionics team developed its electrical systems including the custom-made batteries, circuit boards and the flight controller and motors. The Guidance, Navigation, and Controls team created the software responsible for autonomous flight, waypoint navigation, and flight control. The perception team designed the computer-vision software that processes camera imagery to detect targets and support mapping to navigate missions. The payload team designed the mechanism to control the descent of the payloads and deliver them accurately while the operations team managed the logistics and communications that support the team’s engineering and competition work.

The team does weekly flight tests throughout the school year and even more as they approach the competition.  “I think our performance comes from the amount of iteration and testing we put into the system, as well as the multidisciplinary nature of the team,” said computer science and engineering senior Anthony Tam, the team’s project manager.  “Our members spend a significant amount of time testing individual systems and then integrating and flight-testing the full aircraft in realistic conditions.”

As they competed in Tulsa in triple-digit weather, the students actually saw their first flight drop altitude mid-flight, losing telemetry. Fortunately, it was recovered fully after the crash. Widow’s second flight went on to complete the first fully successful competition run in UCI UAV Forge history with waypoint laps, payload drops and a successful map delivered right on time. “This is a huge accomplishment for our team and it was an incredible feeling for all of us,” said Tam. “One of the things I'm most proud of is that UAV Forge is entirely student-driven, throughout the entire engineering process.”

 “The best part about being on the team is you get to work with like-minded engineers who are very, very passionate about what they do,” said computer science and engineering senior Lucas Li. “You get to learn new stuff like PCB design, better programming, working with different modules and architecture and systems integration. In the end we get a really nice product that wins us international competitions.”

- Natalie Tso