President & Competition Team Lead, Aug 2021 – Jul 2025. Scaled the team from 15 to 75 members across four competition cycles.
Team site
VFS DBVF 2022
1st place
Team growth
15 → 75
SUAS campaign
3 seasons
Sponsorships
$18K+/yr
Interactive CAD
Airframe Specs
Technical Highlights
4 packages delivered autonomously across a 12-mile course (3 miles per lap) in under 30 minutes. Mission-spec waypoint navigation, autonomous targeting, and timed payload release — competition framing for a real delivery system.
Sustained 20 m/s cruise during competition flight, with additional headroom for higher speeds in testing.
YOLOv8 object detection running on NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX, trained on Unity-generated synthetic datasets. Identifies and confirms drop zones autonomously, mid-flight.
Altitude-triggered, sensor-free release mechanism with soft-landing impact protection. Up to 3 lb package payloads, delivered with sub-5 ft accuracy on a 15 lb total-weight airframe.
Tech Stack
Flight / Autonomy
ML / Vision
Mechanical / Manufacturing
Programs
The Buckeye Vertical Professional Development Program was built to give companies direct access to engaged engineering talent at OSU, and give members real exposure to industry work. To anchor it, I revived the Buckeye Vertical Lecture Series in-person — bringing senior engineers from SpaceX, GE Aerospace, Amazon, Boom Supersonic, and Johns Hopkins APL to campus for technical talks on their active work. Each lecture day was paired with a flight demo, networking dinner, and curated resume packages of top members. Members went on to roles at SpaceX, GE Aerospace, and Amazon.
Competition Years
Four years of iteration culminated in a vehicle that flies the full SUAS mission end-to-end: autonomous takeoff, waypoint navigation, mid-flight target identification, payload release, and return — across a 12-mile course in under 30 minutes, with all four packages delivered to sub-5 ft accuracy.
First year the team made it to the SUAS international competition in Maryland, flew a full autonomous mission, and scored mission points — finishing 4th in Mission Demonstration. The big jump from the debut year, and the foundation for the cycles that followed.
Key Achievements
Technical Innovations
Transition year. Pivoted the team from VFS DBVF to the SUAS competition — a bigger mission with payload delivery, object detection, and autonomous flight planning all required end-to-end. Stood up new subteams to handle the scope, and put the structure in place for the program's expansion.
Achievements
Core Development
Freshman year. 1st place at the VFS Design-Build-Vertical-Flight Competition with a hexacopter platform built end-to-end for autonomous package delivery. The result that started everything that followed.
Achievements
Core Development