AI Grand Prix

Autonomous drone racing, conceived by Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and run by Drone Champions League.

Orange AI-GP race gates set through an aircraft hangar, between numbered station pillars and parked jets. — Virtual Qualifier 2, set in a hangar. Image: AI Grand Prix.

Every team flies identical drones with no human pilot, so the only edge is code. I built the Python autonomy stack for a fully autonomous entry, and it advanced past the opening round into Qualifier 2.

How it flies

Computer vision finds the gates and a reinforcement-learning policy picks the fast line through them.
A cascaded velocity and attitude controller flies that line over MAVLink and corrects cross-track error onto each gate.
A control panel retunes gains without a restart, and every run is logged with position, commands and gate passes.