SAE Aero Advanced Class 2026

For the 2026 season, the core team from

SAE Aero Design West 2025 (Micro Class) moved into the SAE Aero Design Advanced Class for our senior capstone project. The Advanced Class mission required an autonomous fixed-wing VTOL aircraft and a holonomic ground vehicle, working together to pick up, deliver, and capture packages without pilot input. I captained the 10-student team.

This was a much harder problem than Micro Class given the tight system integration that’d be required. We designed a multi-vehicle autonomous system to attempt to maximize our score. The VTOL plane used machine vision to perform precision landing, while the payload used bluetooth UWB positioning and machine vision to align itself to the plane for pickup. I designed two full aircraft prototypes in Onshape, built a 4-axis CNC foam cutter for in-house wing manufacturing, and spent a lot of time in ArduPilot tuning VTOL transitions and analyzing flight logs, as well as architecting and prototyping the payload navigation and alignment system. During testing, the payload capture and delivery sequence hit about 92% pickup reliability.

We competed at SAE Aero Design West 2026 in Fort Worth, placing 9th out of 22 teams. We were projected to place higher, but some truly wild shipping issues cut into our preparation time, weather events (lighting, thunder & rain) cut into our mission attempts. Regardless of our placement, it was an experience the entire team learned a lot from, especially about contingency plans and facing unforeseen challenges. More detail coming soon!