UAH News ·
UAH’s final competition report
The university’s feature names me in the team photograph and covers our approach to testing, affordable aircraft, and systems integration.
University of Alabama in Huntsville · NATO SPS
My work on SAPIENCE
I worked on the software that helped our UAH team move from simulation to aircraft: building and deploying services, testing a fleet, and helping fly our first flight on visual-inertial odometry.
My contributions
A repeatable workflow for the team
I built our software factory, with CI/CD pipelines, incremental container builds, and Gazebo simulation tests, for our six-person student team. I built the CLI that installs K3s and joins drones over the mesh network, a Helm chart for deployment, and a Spegel mirror that serves synced images when the fleet is disconnected.
Our team deployed three real aircraft with this tooling, using a smaller set of services for flight.
How I built fleet deploymentTesting at fleet scale
I deployed 25+ drones in PX4 software-in-the-loop simulation on consumer desktop hardware using K3s. This gave us a way to exercise multi-vehicle autonomy and deployment before moving changes onto physical aircraft.
Explore the simulation workFlight testing with visual-inertial odometry
In an experimental research flight in July 2026, we flew PX4 with VIO as the only source of odometry, and I helped fly it from the ground station. The flight case study includes the recorded track, with GPS logged separately as ground truth.
Inspect the flight and recorded dataThe programme
SAPIENCE is a research programme supported by NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme. Its competitions bring university teams together to develop cooperative drones for search and rescue without satellite positioning.
UAH participated alongside City St George’s, University of London, the University of Klagenfurt, and Delft University of Technology. The challenges combined mapping, locating simulated survivors, and coordinating aid delivery.
Project coverage
The University of Alabama in Huntsville · LinkedIn
UAH shares the team’s work
The university’s social post on the final SAPIENCE competition and the team’s approach to autonomous disaster response.
NATO · LinkedIn
NATO’s competition update
NATO’s post about the first SAPIENCE competition and its challenges in navigation, obstacle avoidance, and search and rescue.
NATO Communications and Information Agency · LinkedIn
SAPIENCE in NITECH
NCIA highlights Dr. Bryan Mesmer’s article about the programme’s testing environment and the future of drone technology.