Help SJSU Students Build State of the Art Drone

AURA almost ended before it got going. The Advanced UAV Research Association was founded in 2025 by Joshua Moon and a group of SJSU seniors chasing the world speed record for a small fixed-wing drone. When they graduated, only one member remained: Luca Popescu, now a first-year Data Science graduate student. Now Luca has teamed up with Samuel Thomas Joseph, Terence Hang Ming Yan and Tunir Bhattacharya to rebuild AURA so it would cover every part of UAV technology and never depend on a single graduating class.

That rebuild is working. AURA now has 40 members across two projects. M1, led by senior Aerospace Engineering student Samuel Thomas Joseph, continues the record attempt with a high-speed drone aiming to exceed 500 mph, in collaboration with SJSU's IEEE and AIAA chapters. U2, led by Luca, is a quadcopter that locates objects in unmapped, GPS-denied spaces using only onboard vision and inertial sensing, the kind of capability search-and-rescue missions depend on.

Hardware is our biggest hurdle. Our Associated Students funding is split between both projects and can't cover them both. Your gift buys what we need this year: a propulsion system and carbon fiber airframe materials for M1, plus onboard AI computing chips for U2.

Our goal is $2,000, and our stretch goal is $2,500, with every gift going into this same hardware. Reaching our goal lets us complete U2 and make major progress on M1. Give by December 1!