12/16/2025
A team from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign competed in the A2RL Drone Racing Competition, where drones race autonomously at over 110 mph with zero human control.
Illinois team looks forward to future after Abu Dhabi Autonomous Drone competition
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Illinois team looks forward to future after international drone competition
A team from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign competed in the A2RL Drone Racing Competition, where drones race autonomously at over 110 mph with zero human control.
Written by Cassandra Smith
Imagine drones racing at 50 meters per second, making split-second decisions based solely on onboard artificial intelligence engineered by their inventors. A team from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign participated in such a competition that took them all the way to Abu Dhabi.
Professor Sayan Mitra, an electrical and computer engineering professor who is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, is the advisor for the team of students that participated in the A2RL Drone Racing Competition. Unlike many drone races where pilots control their drones remotely, these drones flew autonomously.
“There are various stages of the competition,” said Mitra. “Initially, you have to demonstrate autonomous flight on your own home-built drone. Then, you have to build a drone platform exactly to given specifications.”
Once competitors show their capabilities, they earn a chance to compete in Abu Dhabi. There, they are provided with a drone to program and fly. The challenge is to develop the software or the “brains” of the drone so that it can fly through the 12-gate racetrack safely and swiftly. All computation happens onboard using small NVIDIA Jetson computers using data from a monocular camera and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). In this competition, performance lives or dies in the code, as high-speed racing leaves no margin for software bugs.
The competition journey
The team’s journey in the competition started in August. “The first stage was to demonstrate autonomous flight with indoor positioning systems using our existing drone,” explained Abhishek Pai, an aerospace master’s student, who led this stage. The team completed this stage with ease.
The next phase proved to be rather difficult. Mitra said they had nearly 50 components to acquire as they built the drone to the competition specifications. Tariffs and delays made logistics surrounding those components even more difficult. With the help of the Coordinated Science Laboratory staff, they were able to get the necessary parts and just make the deadline.
In October, the team made the long trek to Abu Dhabi. Once there, the team was supplied with a drone built to the same specs to fly in the competition.
Once they ported their software successfully, their initial tests and manual flights worked, but there was an issue. “We observed that the sensor delay variations were too much,” said Mitra. "Robotics breaks when physics changes. Building software that doesn't is the challenge--and this competition exposed it sharply.”
When the team attempted their autonomous flight, it did not go as they had hoped.
“The drone crashed in a test flight” said Mitra. “We tried to improve the sensor calibrations but ultimately we ran out of time.”
“We were a bit crestfallen, but we did well in making it all the way to the third phase in our first attempt in this competition. We’ll take the lessons from this year and try again next time .”
Sayan Mitra, professor, electrical & computer engineering
While they did not qualify for Phase IV, there was a silver lining, he said: “We were a bit crestfallen, but we did well in making it all the way to the third phase in our first attempt in this competition. We’ll take the lessons from this year and try again next time.”
Meet the team
This team was composed of several members. The two members who traveled to Abu Dhabi were ECE Ph.D. student Ege Yuceel and Abhishek Pai. Critical technical contributions and team management were done by Suraj Nair, a research engineer for the Center for Autonomy. ECE undergraduate Alan Ilinskiy founded the registered student organization (RSO), Illini Aerial Robotics, dedicated to this competition. CSL Research Engineer John Hart provided experimental support logistics. CSL Office Support Specialist Diana Scott was the procurement hero for those vital drone components.
Lasting impacts
There are several areas impacted by the findings of this project. Technology and platforms from the team’s work will be used in the Safe Autonomy course, taught by Mitra, being offered at Illinois next semester.
Additionally, their findings will help with research efforts. Such implications include exploring the limits of visual control for agile vehicles. They are also working at the boundaries of what is technically possible.
As the team goes forward, they are learning from their experiences and dreaming of the future. They look to develop a robust, well-architected stack from the ground up.
This year, they scrambled together existing libraries using “glue code.” Next year, they hope to construct that purpose-built, properly architected system. They want this new codebase to push research boundaries, advance student-led innovation, and build a sustainable program for future generations of roboticists.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Sayan Mitra is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Information Trust Institute, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Center for Digital Agriculture. He holds a John Bardeen Faculty Scholar appointment.