UC Irvine Giving Day

UAV Forge is a multidisciplinary engineering design team at UC Irvine focused on designing, manufacturing, programming and testing autonomous aerial vehicles. Our team consists of 40 undergraduate students, and each year our goal is to create a design that pushes the limits of innovation to compete against state-of-the-art systems in the annual Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) competition. Our broader mission is to provide students with hands-on experience in real-world engineering challenges, bridging the gap between academia and industry.

The SUAS competition simulates real-world search and rescue missions where teams must develop UAVs capable of autonomous flight, object avoidance, object detection and mapping unfamiliar environments. The UAVs are tested in their ability to fly waypoint laps autonomously and execute an airdrop delivery, accurately deploying a payload to an identified drop zone with a controlled descent.

Progress Report

Since our fall 2025 ZotFunder closed, we’ve been eagerly gearing up for competition, finalizing the vehicle and its capabilities. Your generosity has contributed to countless test prints of our subsystems, testing vehicle types and electronics that help us fly! Thanks to your support, we’re actively finalizing our new quadcopter and improving our payload design. Each weekend has been dedicated to testing and refining our mission code, as our vision and mission paths take shape.

Your Support So Far

Here is a breakdown of how the funds we raised in fall 2025 have been allocated:

$1,250 went towards SUAS registration fees

$250 to SUAS competition fees

$425 to support the manufacturing of custom printed circuit boards (PCBs) 

$600 to support the procurement of essential avionics components, including batteries, sensors and power distribution hardware

We hope that you can assist in our final push to competition readiness! As we enter our final manufacturing phase, we’ll be machining our final aircraft, purchasing our avionics package and most importantly, funding our budding engineers for their trip to competition. 

Thank you for considering a contribution to our mission of UAV innovation and helping us Forge Ahead!