Student teams urged to enter Vertical Flight Society’s new VTOL drone competition

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) has announced details for its inau­gur­al Design-Build-Ver­ti­cal Flight (DBVF) stu­dent com­pe­ti­tion, which seeks to encour­age inter­est in unmanned air­craft tech­nol­o­gy, small air vehi­cle design and fab­ri­ca­tion.

It is the suc­ces­sor to VFS’s high­ly suc­cess­ful Micro Air Vehi­cle (MAV) Stu­dent Com­pe­ti­tion, which expand­ed over eight years from a 1.1lb (500g) gross weight to 3lb (1.4 kg), with increas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing lev­els of mis­sion com­plex­i­ty. 

To par­tic­i­pate, five-page pro­pos­als must be sub­mit­ted by teams no lat­er than Thurs­day, 15th Octo­ber. The Pre­lim­i­nary Design Report is due on 20th Decem­ber, with the Final Tech­ni­cal Report on 7th March 2021.

The fly-off por­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion is sched­uled to take place at the Army Research Lab (ARL) Robot­ics Research Col­lab­o­ra­tion (R2C2) at Graces Quar­ters in Mary­land, on 16th-17th April, 2021.

Michael Hirschberg, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety, said: “We encour­age uni­ver­si­ties from around the world to form teams and take part in this excit­ing and chal­leng­ing com­pe­ti­tion, which is con­duct­ed to pro­mote stu­dent inter­est in VTOL engi­neer­ing and tech­nol­o­gy, and to attract the best and bright­est engi­neer­ing stu­dents to the ver­ti­cal flight indus­try.

“The com­pe­ti­tion is designed to devel­op hands-on skills and famil­iari­sa­tion with elec­tric VTOL and urban air mobil­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy at the uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent lev­el and pre­pare the next gen­er­a­tion of engi­neers and lead­ers to push the lim­its of this excit­ing tech­nol­o­gy into the future.”

The gen­er­al air­craft require­ments are restrict­ed to the unmanned air­craft sys­tem (UAS) Group 1, which lim­its the max­i­mum take-off weight (MTOW) to no more than 20 lb (9.1 kg). Air­craft size and weight will fac­tor into the com­pe­ti­tion scor­ing as described in the scor­ing sec­tion of the Request for Pro­pos­al.

A total of $5,000 in cash awards will be giv­en in two rounds: $1,000 for sub­mis­sion of the three best pre­lim­i­nary design reports, and $4,000 in awards for the top three teams dur­ing the fly-off com­pe­ti­tion.

Full details, includ­ing the request for pro­pos­al (RFP), fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions (FAQ), links and more are avail­able on the com­pe­ti­tion web­site: .