UAS Challenge

ALARP 2026

Why participate?

Considering taking part in the UAS Challenge?

The UAS Challenge is the most established UAS engineering competition in the world and continues to grow year on year, with more universities and industry partners around the world taking part in the competition. Organised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it provides opportunities for young engineers to develop their skills and experience on a real-world engineering project. We welcome you and your team to be a part of our friendly, growing community and enjoy our fun and exciting competition!

For students and teams

  • Put your engineering knowledge to the test with a competition as close to the real world as possible.
  • Gain practical experience of designing, manufacturing, optimising and testing a product alongside key soft skills, including team-working, time management, project management, budgeting and formal presentation skills.
  • Become a well-rounded and capable graduate engineer for your first role in industry.
  • Get mentored by a well-established aerospace engineering organisation and get additional support for designing, building and testing.
  • Make valuable connections and network with hundreds of like-minded students from universities across the UK and worldwide.
  • Learn more about the cutting-edge of UAS and drone technologies.
  • Meet and network with potential future employers during the live fly-off and team mentoring opportunities.

For universities

  • Complements academic studies with practical applications of course topics and experience of a real-world engineering project.
  • Enhance your university's opportunities for students and contribute to undergraduate recruitment activities.
  • Engage with industry partners in your curriculum and research activities.
  • Integrate elements of the UAS Challenge processes into coursework exercises and course units involving design, team, and research projects.
  • Make firm connections with engineering companies through the UAS Challenge mentorship scheme.
  • Boost student satisfaction and motivation for project work.
  • Support formal membership accreditation activities.

Register for UAS Challenge 2027

28 June - 1 July 2027

BMFA Buckminster, UK

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Register your team

UAS Challenge 2026 in numbers

The UAS Challenge is the largest UAS engineering competition in the world and continues to grow year on year, with more universities and industry partners around the world taking part in the competition.

We welcome you and your team to be a part of our friendly community and enjoy our fun and exciting competition!

450+ students

50+ teams

85+ volunteers

16 countries

4 days flying

Teams included representatives from

Challenge social evening

The UAS Challenge social evening is a great opportunity for teams to take time out of the hectic competition schedule to relax and connect with the wider Challenge community.


The evening provides food, drink and entertainment and provides a great opportunity to make friendships with hundreds of other like-minded students in an informal setting.

New for 2027: vendors and sponsors will bring their aircraft to play, with an exciting demonstration of state-of-the-art UAS and UAV technologies.

Watch competition highlights

What our participants say

"A lot of the skills that we learn at the UAS Challenge are pretty much directly applicable and all that experience feeds in directly to what we do in industry. Those skills of figuring out requirements for autopilot systems, setting tasks, keeping to deadlines, as well as dealing with project management from start to end as well, it’s all been super useful in my current role.

It's just the best experience that you can get for a job and for interviews. If you have that direct experience of designing and building something, and working with people; these are really key skills, plus they are great to talk about in interviews.

Oliver Gent, Systems Engineer, Callen-Lenz Associates, and 2021-2022 UAS Challenge participant with University of Surrey


"Designing for the UAS Challenge also gave me a good grounding in using professional design software. I was thrown into the deep end of professional CAD design when I started my course and I was able to learn how to use Siemens NX to help design our drones. That gave me a good grounding for when I got into industry and needed to use CATIA; while I initially found it to be a very different way of doing design work, I definitely picked it up faster because I had that background of using an industry-standard software package.

Being able to communicate between different teams and team members is also an important thing that I learned from my time at Loughborough UAV and there’s a lot of similarities in industry. It sounds simple and obvious, but getting people on the same page helps identify potential problems and often prevents you from wasting a lot of time designing something that doesn’t perform as expected or that doesn’t meet the requirements of each department."

Shane Morris, Design Engineer, Spirit AeroSystems, and 2021-2022 UAS Challenge participant with Loughborough University


"What I’m doing now is directly linked to my course in Aeronautical Engineering and diploma in Industrial Studies, and being a part of the UAS Challenge gave me the right knowledge and experience to be in the role I am now. The challenge gives you a taste of what drone technology is available now and where it's going, because you're always trying to come up with cool, radical concepts for your UAS and as a team you try to put it all together.

You're submitting your ideas, business plans and doing all the engineering reporting for your UAS, which is exactly what it is like in the real world. It’s perfect: you don't realise it at first and think “Oh, this is all a bit of a waste of time; I'm not here to do business, I’m here to do engineering!” and then you realise “Actually, hold on a minute: this is exactly what it's like!” You bid for a project, submit all your technical analysis and engineering reports, get it approved and then go out, build it and fly it. It really is as real world as it gets for a student."

Vinay Hirani, Systems Engineer, BAE Systems Air, and 2021 UAS Challenge participant with Loughborough University