Care to take your mind off the cap raise for a moment and read about a capstone project instead?
Raytheon has been sponsoring an annual engineering contest between universities - held across 4 different regions since 2023/2024* - called the RTX Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC).
* for the first couple of years it was held in the Texas Region only
While the competition rules change every year, the underlying concept remains the same: multi-disciplinary student teams are challenged to construct two autonomous vehicles each on a predefined budget (which was US$ 5000 during the last round). Either two aerial ones (UAVs) or both an aerial (UAV) and a ground one (UGV) that will need to communicate with each other and complete their tasks modelled on real world-challenges (eg a search and rescue mission) without any human intervention. This requires collaboration between students across different uni departments such as Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as Computer Science. So team effort over the duration of roughly a year is a must. As is project management. For many of those students, participation in the AVC is actually their Senior Capstone Project.
For competition sponsor Raytheon, collaborating with universities around their company’s major hubs is a great way to find potential new employees. Multiple Raytheon staff are mentoring the competing teams of students (most of whom are in their senior year) throughout the project’s duration. Take Sylvia Traxler, for example, whom you may remember as a visitor to the BrainChip CES 2025 suite alongside two of her colleagues (it was the BrainChip LinkedIn post with their group photo that got deleted shortly after posting). An alumni of the University of South Florida (she is currently also pursuing a Masters in Artificial Intelligence at The University of Texas at Austin), she assisted her alma mater’s 2024/2025 student team as a mentor and saw them win 1st place at the East Coast AVC in April.
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California-based James Cooper is another example of a Raytheon AVC university mentor, in his case assisting California State University Long Beach:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mobtek_2025-raytheon-west-coast-autonomous-vehicle-activity-7373316123850657792-MV4b
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The 2023/2024 Raytheon AVC was basically a game of tag, in which the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles had to detect and track a target - namely their rivals’ ground vehicles - and deliver a water blast of 20 ml to activate a moisture sensor on the competing universities’ ground vehicles, while avoiding to shower their own UGV.
All ground vehicles had ArUco* markers on top, which helped the drones’ computer vision systems to identify them correctly.
* https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/computer-vision/detecting-aruco-markers-with-opencv-and-python-1/
The 2024/25 Raytheon AVC (“Mission Full Send!”) had student teams imagine a scenario of delivering aid to an injured soldier on a battlefield, which required them to first deploy a Scout UAV mapping an area to search for the wounded person and relay the coordinates of the detected landing zone - denoted by a specific ArUco marker - directly to the other UAV resp. UGV, which was then required to deliver a first aid kit to the specified area. All done autonomously without a human in the loop.
(cf.
https://www.gmu.edu/news/2025-05/dr...-raytheon-autonomous-vehicle-competition-2025)
Here is a video about the 2025 West Coast finals that took place in June.
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It appears another team from California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) State University San Luis Obispo has been participating in the latest Raytheon AVC challenge that seems to have been dubbed "Operation Touchdown", and that one member of the current student team, Computer Engineering Senior Gianni Schiappa (who was an Operations Systems intern with Raytheon this summer) used Akida for the fully autonomous drone system he developed:
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From what Gianni Schiappa writes on LinkedIn, it almost sounds as if the “Raytheon Autonomous Drone and Rover” project were already done and dusted, although Raytheon’s AVC is conceptualised as a two semester-project, culminating in an intermural competition in (Northern hemisphere) spring. Unfortunately, he did not specify a time frame for the project. All I can say is that he was not part of the Cal Poly team that competed in the 2024/2025 AVC West Coast finals in June of this year (and neither was Akida used in their UVA, see
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1933&context=mesp).
However, the accompanying photo he posted - a screenshot taken less than a month ago, possibly a captured still image of a video - appears to depict a competition, not just training. Maybe some fall semester qualifying contest?
Or is it a recent screenshot of a much older photo or video?
Anyway, nice to see Akida being used in more and more university student projects these days. After all, those young engineers will be tomorrow’s workforce and will already have gained first-hand experience in implementing neuromorphic technology by the time they enter the job market as graduates.
But it’s now up to our management to sign deals and make meaningful revenue to enable those future researchers to continue to work with our products in the years to come.
