Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Team

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Team at the University of Texas at Austin competes annually in the AUVSI Student Unmanned Air System Competition in Maryland. The team, restarted last year, is comprised of approximately 25-30 undergraduate students from the Aerospace, Civil, and Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science departments. Student come in with varying levels of UAV system knowledge, from those who know nothing of RC planes to those who are avid flyers. After their first year, team members are competent in their chosen focus, whether that is avionics systems, air vehicle construction, automated image recognition, or the autopilot system.

For the competition, our air vehicle will perform the following tasks:​

• Autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing.
• Autonomous waypoint navigation.
• Automatic image search and recognition.
• Automatic QR Code reading.
• Automatically dowload/upload with a remote access point.
• Perform an egg drop onto a target.
• Simulated obstacle avoidance.
• Live position updating of obstacles and plane via server.

All of these tasks are real-life problems which must be tackled by industry on a daily basis. Students are also not taught how to perform the majority of the work they do with the UAV Team in their coursework. Furthermore, the Unmanned Air Systems industry is among the fastest growing industries in the nation. UAV's can be found in almost every industry, from gas and oil to sports, from archaeology to disaster relief and firefighting. According to the Teal Group, the UAV industry will total $91 Billion this year alone. Due to these facts, companies give high preference to students with UAV experience over others. 

This school year, the team will not only be modifying an RC plane for the 2015 competition but also will be starting a fully composite (fiberglass, foam, and carbon fiber) plane for the 2016 competition. This will give us experience in designing UAV's from scratch, letting Juniors and Seniors apply their coursework to the project directly.

Our main expenses are travel (competition travel is paid for by the team for the 5-6 students that attend), HD video camera, backup components, the registration fee, and general construction materials. Because we will be building an entire plane from scratch this year, as well as saving for next year's plane, our continued success as a team relies upon a successful fundraising campaign. Your donation will help us continue doing what we love- designing, building, and flying unmanned aerial vehicles. 

For more information, feel free to visit our Facebook page or contact any of our Project Owners via email (found in their bios by clicking on their pictures).