A group photo of the award-winning team (from left to right) Mr ZHANG Yifei, Mr LO Li-Yu and Mr TAN Zheng
We are proud to announce that a team of AAE students recently won the first runner-up prize at the 2025 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS'25) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Competition held in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. The competition was inspired by the scenario of multi-robot coordination in complex environments. It challenged participants to develop autonomous UAV systems capable of exploring artificial tags while maintaining robust communication and optimizing energy usage through charging scheduling.
The competition was divided into two stages – a preliminary round focused on simulation and system verification, followed by the final round in a real-world setting. The mission required UAVs to identify and count uniquely marked tags scattered throughout a complex map while maintaining indirect communication links (no line-of-sight allowed between UAVs and the base station) and planning efficient recharging schedules.
Led by Prof. Wen Chih-Yung, Chair Professor of Aeronautical Engineering, the student team comprising Mr Li Yuzhou, Mr Lo Li-yu, Mr Tan Zheng and Mr Zhang Yifei, competed against 22 other teams from over 18 regions around the world. UAVs were equipped with onboard monocameras and built upon the lightweight Crazyflie platform. The top five teams from Hong Kong, South Korea, India, Armenia, and Poland advanced to the final competition. The mission performance was evaluated based on communication link maintenance, the number of correctly identified tags, and overall completion time.
Congratulations to the awardees and participants!
About ICUAS’25
ICUAS’25 UAV is an international competition for research students, co-hosted by the University of North Carolina Charlotte, the University of Denver, IEEE, IEEE Control Systems Society, IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, and the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems Association, Inc. (ICUAS). It provided an invaluable opportunity for students to showcase their engineering expertise on the global stage and benchmark their skills against the brightest minds in the field of Unmanned Aerial Systems.
