Student-led team advances in global Emergency Response Flyer competition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State aerospace engineering student-led team has been selected as a stage two winner for their Emergency Response Flyer prototype in the NASA-backed, global competition GoAERO. The team, along with seven other selected teams from across the world, will receive funding to transition their prototype into a full-fledged unmanned aerial vehicle for the 2027 Final Fly Off at NASA Ames Research Center.

The GoAERO Prize challenge, which is supported by NASA, RTX and Honeywell, aims to “make emergency response aircraft available to all,” according to its website. The participating teams are working to develop safe, portable, autonomy-enabled aircraft that will be used to rescue people and respond to natural disasters, everyday medical emergencies and humanitarian crises.

“The GoAERO aircraft are needed now more than ever,” said Gwen Lighter, GoAERO founder and CEO. “GoAERO was founded to create both the transformative flight technologies that save lives, and the collaborative network across industry, government and first responder organizations to ensure the safe and effective future deployment of these emergency response aircraft.”

The Penn State team, led by aerospace engineering doctoral candidate Rachel Axten, is a partnership between Penn State and Soteria Flight Technologies, which was founded by Axten and other researchers from the Penn State aerospace department and launched through the Invent Penn State Summer Founders program. The team is building an unmanned aircraft system designed as an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-operate heavy-lift system suited for various public safety missions. It features a fully autonomous waypoint following with collision avoidance protection and landing zone selection with minimum operator inputs, while also enabling faster response times, larger payload capacities, and safer operations for all crew members responding to emergencies.

“Our phase two win reinforces our focus on a heavy-lift system that’s both highly autonomous and easy to deploy and operate,” Axten said. “We’re excited to demonstrate these capabilities at the Final Fly-Off and advance public safety and medical emergency response with mission options that aren’t consistently available today.”

The team has previously designed and fielded drone systems for search-and-rescue scenarios through the National Institute of Standards and Technology Public Safety Communications Research Unmanned Aircraft System First Responder Challenges.

“Competitions like this are a great way to foster exciting applications of technology — consider how the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 led almost directly to the explosion of interest in autonomous driving,” said Eric Johnson, a team member and professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State. “GoAERO could similarly inspire future life-saving missions for this technology. Maybe we’ll look back on today as the dark ages before a flying robot could whisk you to a hospital when needed.” 

In addition to Axten and Johnson, the team members are Vitor Valente, assistant teaching professor; graduate students Aniruddha Perumalla and Maxwell Palamarchuk; and undergraduate students Ameya Adkar, Ishan Haque, Gianna Coniglio, Samay Shingatwar, Nicolas Baeta, Adrian Gaidula and Aum Dave, all from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Undergraduate student Chaitanya Patel from the Department of Mechanical Engineering is also a member of the team.

About GoAERO

In 2024, GoAERO launched the GoAERO Prize, which is a global competition committed to inspiring the creation of Emergency Response Flyers that rescue people in danger and respond to disaster wherever it is found. With more than $2 million in prizes, the competition aims to help create safe, portable, robust, autonomy-enabled flyers. Teams competing in the GoAERO Prize will compete over a three-year period and benefit from expert mentorship, global exposure, access to software, products and services, and monetary prizes. To register a team or learn more about the GoAERO Prize, visit the website.