The UC Davis team was the top award winner at the 2024-25 CITRIS Aviation Prize competition, earning $12,000 for their innovative design of an intercampus air transportation system for UC students, faculty and staff.
The Vertical Flight Society takes off with a brand-new chapter at UC Davis. The new club, which integrates undergraduate and graduate students, explores the current technologies and possible advancements for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft like helicopters and drones.
Autonomous vehicles can struggle when confronted with unforeseen events, such as a car driving on the wrong side of the road. To address this issue, Professor Junshan Zhang is rethinking how researchers design AVs by letting the machine learning models train themselves.
A team of UC Davis undergraduate students took home $6,000 in awards from the CITRIS Aviation Prize for their project SMART UC Davis, which proposes using electrical vertical takeoff and landing aircraft as air taxis between UC campuses.
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Kari Watkins leads a project to turn the UC Davis campus into the world’s premier living-learning lab for researching bike and bus infrastructure.
Air travel now accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and the sector’s emissions are rising: Global air travel more than doubled from 2004 to 2019. This is literally a first-world problem — most people on Earth fly rarely, if ever. By some estimates, the 1% of humans who fly most often are responsible for half of all air travel emissions.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has awarded a team of researchers from the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis and Merced a two-year grant to simulate urban air mobility in the San Francisco area, and to draft regulations for this highly complex form of travel.
