Three UC Davis Teams Win Top Awards at CITRIS Aviation Prize
Student teams from the University of California, Davis, took three of the four major prizes at the recent conclusion of the 2025-26 CITRIS Aviation Prize, an annual competition hosted by the University of California’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute, or CITRIS.
Each year, students are tasked with designing an element of an air taxi system to connect the four CITRIS campuses: UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz. This year, the students were challenged to design a vertiport placement simulation tool for California Airlink, the state’s first advanced air mobility network, with the intention of connecting CITRIS campuses via an electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft.
Teams were judged on simulation software design, vertiport placement and routing, safety and emergency systems, scalability and roadmap, sustainability and environmental integration, innovation and vision, and economic feasibility.
Of the six final teams, the three from UC Davis, all comprised of undergraduate students, were recognized for their efforts. Davis Vision to Mission earned the $5,000 Atech Award for Most Innovation Design for Air Mobility. Davis Airlink eVolve received the $2,000 DART Community Integration Award. Dare to Ascend Vertically Into the Sky, or DAVIS, was awarded the $1,500 CITRIS Aviation Excellence Award.
Starting from scratch
Davis Vision to Mission got its name from its beginnings: team leader and third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering undergraduate student Alparslan Ege Erdogan says DVTM started as nothing more than a shared vision.
Erdogan heard about the challenge from last year’s winners at UC Davis. This year, he decided to participate when his advisor, Zhaodan Kong, associate director of CITRIS at UC Davis and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, recommended he give it a try. From there, Erdogan built a team from the ground up, prioritizing quality over quantity, seeking a small group of members with high standards of work.
“We started from zero and came up to the point that we were actually able to create software for a problem that we didn’t even know existed,” said Erdogan. “We needed to learn the solutions, and we needed to learn the problem. We did a lot of problem analysis.”
The final product, AURORA-i, is a decision-support platform for designing the Urban Air Mobility, or UAM, network, which connects the CITRIS campuses and select airports. It helps with vertiport location selection, simulation, environmental and economic impact analysis and planning.
Using AI-powered analysis capabilities, AURORA-i recommends optimizations and calculates outcomes. “You either get replaced by AI or make AI,” said Erdogan.
“This is going to be happening soon, UAM is going to take over the normal modes of transportation,” Erdogan said. “The software that we created is implementable, usable and industry ready.”
‘Ragtag’ group of friends writes 70,000 lines of code
UC Davis team Airlink eVolve’s simulation architecture uses a whopping 70,000 lines of code, nine simulation components and 16 evaluation rubric metrics. It all started when a group of friends, who created an autonomous robotics club last fall, opted into the aviation competition after meeting with Sam King, a professor of computer science and the director of CITRIS at UC Davis.
The aviation challenge was somewhat of a last-minute undertaking for the group. “We figured, we’ll try our best and just check it out and see how it goes,” said group member Nils Fleig, a second-year undergraduate in computer science. “We were a bit more on the ragtag group kind of side of things. I think a lot of other teams were kind of seasoned researchers from research labs, which was really cool to see.”
In the past, Fleig worked as a software engineer intern at OrgOrg, an online platform that organizes productivity tools, such as syncing and integrating spreadsheets from Google, messages from Slack, and pay information on Gusto. He also founded MCMetrics, an analytics server for Minecraft, and won a $7,500 award for it at a UC Davis startup competition last year.
Following his experience in the startup world, the aviation competition felt like a breath of fresh air. Fleig enjoyed the opportunity to freely explore research and academia. Over the almost year-long process, his team had the space to experiment and be creative. Week after week, his group, comprising an array of majors and backgrounds, casually met up to work on its project.
“The idea of giving these six teams a year to just kind of go ham and see what they can do with this proposal is really cool, honestly, and brings out a lot of creativity,” Fleig said.
Humans take the cake
Dare to Ascend Vertically Into the Sky, or DAVIS, created a simulation that connects a chain of decisions: where to fly, where to land, what risks to avoid and costs to consider. It answers these questions by providing information about weather, noise, population density and protected areas. Using this data, users can plan routes for eVTOL flights.
Team member Jesse Sandoz, a third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering undergraduate student, heard about the aviation project from Camli Badrya, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who runs the lab where he volunteers and later advised his group.
“I took on the project because of CITRIS’s values, which prioritize innovation for the benefit of all of society,” Sandoz said. “Particularly with eVTOLs, there’s a significant risk of these technologies serving only a small population without consideration of the broader communities affected by them.”
To minimize negative impacts on citizens and animals below, part of this year’s evaluation criteria involved sustainability and environmental integration. This includes an awareness of weather, noise, wildlife and other potentially disruptive environmental factors. Sandoz’s team addressed these by consulting experts in other disciplines — for example, they spoke with wildlife conservation majors to identify bird migration risks.
The team also considered employing AI in the deployment of eVTOLs, but unlike other teams, they found human engineers superior.
“While there may be a need to employ some form of artificial intelligence in the deployment of eVTOLs, we found that everything that can be done by a human engineer is better in the end,” Sandoz said.
Sandoz found CITRIS, sponsors and NASA Ames to be “incredibly gracious, thoughtful, and engaged throughout the competition.”
“It felt great,” Sandoz said. “I am very proud of the work we did.”
