The AERPAW platform hosted its second autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) student competition called the AERPAW Autonomous Data Mule (AADM) challenge. This was a multi-phased challenge held between February and September 2025. The goal of the challenge was to download data from four AERPAW base stations (BSs) as quickly as possible with a UAV.
In total, 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.
We are excited to announce the winners of the 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
Our sincere appreciation to the challenge sponsors Keysight Technologies, NI (National Instruments), and AUVSI North Carolina.
Our appreciation also goes out to 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
