Design and build of a tilt-tricopter VTOL UAV for SUAS Competition 2025

Sapienza Flight Team launched the Stingray VTOL program to compete in SUAS 2025 with a novel tilt-tricopter platform capable of hovering like a multirotor and cruising like a fixed-wing aircraft. I lead the design of the mission-planning and control stack that drives the vehicle through vertical, transition, and forward-flight regimes while enforcing the competition safety envelope.

The architecture couples geometric controllers for attitude and thrust allocation with MATLAB/Simulink toolchains for mission sequencing, redundancy monitoring, and envelope protection. Extensive software-in-the-loop testing and repeated field sorties stress-tested fault responses, verified transition logic, and tuned gain schedules so the aircraft can withstand gusts, actuator nonlinearities, and communication dropouts during autonomous sorties.