Carleton University’s Blackbird UAV team proudly achieved 3rd place at the 16th Annual Aerial Evolution Association of Canada Student UAS Competition, held from May 9–11, 2025, in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Read more about the Blackbird UAV team below.
Photo credits to Blackbird UAV Team.
Written by Kevin Fernando, Blackbird UAV Operations Lead:
About the team:
Blackbird UAV has been an active student design team at Carleton University since 2008. In recent years, our team has grown significantly, with over 200 members and more than 350 participants in our online community. The team consists of students from a wide range of engineering disciplines and contains members from the Ontario Engineering Competitions 2025 Winning team. Our focus is on designing, building, and competing with UAVs. Offering students hands-on experience in aerospace/systems engineering, manufacturing, and industry-standard software applications.
About the competition:
The aim of the competition was to develop a fire hotspot detection and suppression system. The UAV was designed to autonomously detect multiple hotspots within a very large zone. Once the hotspots were detected, the next objective was to autonomously pick up water from a reservoir and dispense it on the hotspots.
During our time at the competition we faced many adversities which we very proudly overcame. Firstly, during testing before our first flight window we blew one of our motors and had to very quickly prepare our only spare motor for our flight window. During our first flight window we lost the spare motor as well and were now not able to complete the competition. Queens University graciously lent us one of their motors which coincidentally was the exact same motors we used. After a lot of debugging we found the issue and spent a very long time taking apart the entire drone to fix it.
Once our second flight window came around we ran into another big issue. 30 minutes before our flight time the Raspberry Pi running all of our automation system broke. All of our backup Pi’s were out of commission and so we reached out to more schools for help. Thanks to the University of Victoria, we were once again able to compete and successfully finished the mission.
A very big thank you to Queens Aerospace Design Team and UVic Aero! Without their help we would not have been able to complete the tasks. They played a huge role in our success.
About the UAV we designed and how we built it:
Throughout the year we went through many phases including conceptual design using solidworks to CAD all of our parts. In the manufacturing phase we worked with a lot of composites including carbon fibre and fibreglass along with aluminum machining and a lot of 3d printing. An extensive testing and revising phase was also conducted to tune the flight characteristics and test all the systems.
The drone was built in a Quadcopter configuration with a fully modular payload meaning we can easily swap out the camera and water tank systems. It also included First Person View cameras to give better precision for the pilots.
