ST. LOUIS – An unmanned aerial system (UAS) built by Saint Louis University's Aircraft Computational and Resource Aware Fault Tolerance (AirCRAFT) Lab was named the most innovative at the 2025 Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) Competition. The event is sponsored by RoboNation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing robotics education and workforce development.

The SUAS Competition, held annually since 2002, is designed to foster interest in the autonomous aerial systems industry and engage students in a challenging mission-based contest. Teams must design, build, and demonstrate an autonomous UAS capable of complex tasks, such as autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, aerial imaging, and precision payload delivery. These skills reflect cutting-edge applications of drone technology in industry and defense.

Competitors were graded on technical design, a flight readiness review presentation and a mission demonstration. Tasks judged during the competition included:

• Autonomous Flight - The UAS must take off, fly within boundaries, navigate a series of way points, and land.
• Obstacle Avoidance - The UAS must avoid other aircraft sharing the airspace through sense-detect-avoid.
• Object Detection, Classification, Localization - The UAS takes pictures of a search area, detects objects of interest, classifies its characteristics, and provides a GPS position.
• Air Delivery - The UAS autonomously drops a payload object so that it lands undamaged at a target GPS position.

Working together to build the UAS is an exercise in working with each team member’s skill set.

“Everyone has a role based on their expertise, but everyone also works together,” Jose Alejandro Crespo Cuellar said. “There is a universal feeling of ownership in the lab over any project we do.”

The students spent weeks after the spring semester ended working on the UAS. They tested it, rebuilt it and tested it again.

“We designed a collapsible version and then had to go back to the drawing board - it crashed 10 days before the competition,” senior Abdelrahman Osman Ibrahim said. “But it gave us a chance to redesign it in and come back with something better.”

SLU’s team wasn’t alone in its challenges.  

“Every team had a thing that went wrong at the last minute,” said junior Amrik Singh Chana. “Having done our rebuild ahead of time helped us be prepared for the chaos of the competition and the last-minute fixes.” 

“We continued from were we were to get better,” Michael Brady added. 

The AirCRAFT Lab UAS team also includes juniors and seniors Aida Bah, Sameera Sankar, Sahra Shah, Divine Nwaokorie, Mohammedshadab Abdulrauf Ghanchi, Chris Schaefer, Kristian Nasi, Mohammed Mahad Mirza and Ryan Gade.

The team authored a technical paper on the construction of their UAS, which is slated to be published later this year.

“We worked so hard on this - we practically lived in the lab before we left,” Ibrahim said. “We didn't want to leave anything to chance. We put it all out there for this competition.”

The 2025 Competition welcomed 300 students from 53 international university and high performing high school teams. For RoboNation, which assumed management of the SUAS Competition in 2023, the program exemplifies the synergy of real-world technology education and workforce development. The competition provides a platform for students from around the world to showcase their ingenuity, technical prowess, and teamwork on an international stage. 

“This is a fantastic competition for aerospace students,” said Srikanth Gururajan, Ph.D., associate professor of aerospace engineering and faculty leader of the AirCRAFT Lab. “It provides our students an opportunity to tie together all the subject areas they learn about in the classroom.” 

About RoboNation

RoboNation, a nonprofit organization, is on a mission to provide hands-on robotics education, empowering students to tackle global challenges. With a portfolio of nine educational programs spanning K-12 and university levels, RoboNation cultivates the next generation of engineers, manufacturers, fabricators, programmers, and more. Participants in RoboNation programs represent the highly skilled workforce of tomorrow. 

About Saint Louis University

Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic research institutions. Rooted in Jesuit values and its pioneering history as the first university west of the Mississippi River, SLU offers more than 15,300 students a rigorous, transformative education that challenges and prepares them to make the world a better place. As a nationally recognized leader in research and innovation, SLU is an R1 research university, advancing groundbreaking, life-changing discoveries that promote the greater good.