Role
Team member · Mechanical Team Captain · Pilot · AI R&D
The brief
Teknofest is Turkey's largest aerospace and technology festival, and the Combat UAV Competition is one of its most demanding tracks. Each year, teams design, build, fly and compete a fixed-wing UAV in an aerial mission — object recognition, autonomous waypoints, target acquisition — against dozens of other university teams from across the country.
I joined the team as a first-year undergraduate and stayed with it for four consecutive competition cycles.
What I did
- Mechanical Team Captain. Owned the mechanical design and analysis workstream — airframe geometry, load paths, weight budget, structural analysis, and coordination across mechanical, electronics and software.
- Pilot. Flew the aircraft in official competition rounds — takeoff, mission execution and landing, with the added pressure of live judging on a fixed schedule.
- AI R&D. Joined the AI R&D subteam developing autonomous pathfinding algorithms for self-guided flight planning within the mission zone.
- Team coordination. On the three-year arc, moved from an execution role to a leadership role — managing the mechanical subteam, mentoring newer members, and running the intra-team communication.
Results
- 2023 — 1st Place in the Combat UAV Competition. National champion.
- 2024 — Finalist in the same competition — top of the country in a much larger field.
What it taught me
Everything I've since built as an AI and software engineer draws on this project. A UAV is not a codebase — you can't push a hotfix at 2 am. Mission day is the exam, and the exam is graded by physics. That discipline — write it right the first time, verify against reality, treat every subsystem as a hostile witness — carries over directly to safety-adjacent AI work.
The team environment was the other half of it: coordinating a mechanical crew, an electronics crew and a software crew who all speak slightly different languages, on a deadline, with a competition schedule that doesn't move. Every professional environment I've worked in since has been easier by comparison.