The AERPAW platform is excited to announce the winners of its second UAV student competition, the AERPAW Autonomous Data Mule (AADM) Challenge, a multi-phased autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) student competition.
The AADM Challenge ran between February and September 2025. Each of the participating teams worked toward the goal of downloading data from four AERPAW base stations (BSs) as quickly as possible with a UAV.
Out of the 22 teams registered for the AADM challenge, 16 submitted their projects for evaluation in the AERPAW digital twin, and 11 qualified as finalists for testbed experiments at Lake Wheeler Field Labs. Over 16 hours of experiments were conducted in September to support 33 UAS flights.
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 AERPAW AADM Challenge:
- 1st Place: InFlux, University of Utah
- 2nd Place: Neural Flyers, North Carolina State University
- 3rd Place (Tie): IMPRESS@UGA, University of Georgia, and WiMNet, Columbia University
AERPAW sincerely appreciates the challenge sponsors: Keysight Technologies, NI (National Instruments), and AUVSI North Carolina; as well as all the teams from North Carolina State University University of Utah The University of Georgia Columbia University Florida International University University at Buffalo Florida Atlantic University National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Southern Methodist, University University of North Texas.
Click here to explore and learn more about the winning approaches.
