When a team of aerospace engineering students from The University of Texas at Austin set out to build an unmanned aircraft to detect and extinguish wildfires, they weren’t just working toward a final grade. Their project would grow beyond the class, an international competition, and even the aircraft itself.
The effort began when professor Luis Sentis approached professor of practice Greg Zwernemann, both of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, about entering the XPRIZE Wildfire Competition. The four-year, $11 million competition aims to incentivize the innovation of firefighting technologies to transform wildfire management approaches. Zwernemann’s senior design course took on the challenge for the 2024-25 academic year.
“Our goal was to design an unmanned aircraft that could locate and suppress incipient wildfires,” Zwernemann said.
The UT-led FLARE-X team was a collaboration between UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering in addition to the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), TU Delft (Netherlands) and Texas A&M Forest Service. Competing against over 100 teams, FLARE-X advanced to the semifinal round to demonstrate its aircraft at the RELLIS Proving Grounds near Bryan, Texas, in October 2025.
Only five teams moved on to the finals, and although UT wasn’t one of them, the competition pushed the endeavor from a classroom project into its own enterprise. One of the initial requirements of the competition was for each team to establish and operate as its own company. To fulfill this, the student team created and worked under the newly founded AIVE AI Systems Inc., and by the time UT exited the competition, the company had taken on a life of its own.
Sentis spearheaded efforts to establish and expand AIVE beyond XPRIZE and the University. He has a successful track record with startups branching from on-campus work, most notably the robotics company Apptronik. His experience, combined with ongoing work from the FLARE-X team, led to AIVE’s growth.
Development efforts carried through the summer and fall of 2025, employing dozens of undergraduate and graduate students and drawing continued support from UT’s Discovery to Impact, which helped finance necessary resources and supported AIVE’s spinoff as an independent company.
During the competition period, aerospace engineering student Romain Roussel, B.S. ’25, served as the team’s project manager before later shifting into a systems engineering role. Andrew Doty, B.S. ’25, led design and manufacturing of the aircraft itself, eventually overseeing a crew of more than a dozen people. After graduation, the two have continued working with AIVE through its focused transition. Doty moved into the commercial side of the business while Roussel, now pursuing a master’s degree, returned to AIVE this summer as a systems engineering intern.
Rather than continuing to focus on aircraft for wildfires, the team redirected its mission toward a piece of technology developed as a backup system during the competition: software that lets drones determine their location without relying on GPS.
“To use GPS, you need to be connected to at least three satellites, ideally four,” Roussel said. “Those signals can be easily jammed.” AIVE’s software, now called Atlas Geo, allows drones to keep operating in contested or unreliable environments.
The pivot also reflected a hard business reality. “The thing that investors wanted most was something we could commercialize quickly,” Doty said. Building aircraft from scratch is expensive, and competing on hardware alone puts the team up against companies with far deeper pockets. “There’s a reason why there are so many software startups and not really many hardware startups,” Doty said.
Cost was part of the team’s edge from the start. “We were competing against companies like Anduril, who had a few million dollars to put into the project,” Roussel said. “We were trying to offer solutions that took up less space, were easier to implement, and cheaper.”
Although the company is navigating a new venture, its ties to UT haven’t loosened. AIVE continued funding the senior design course through the 2025-26 academic year, during which a new cohort of students designed a second generation of aircraft. The new designs included a vertical takeoff and landing variant and a long-endurance communications relay aircraft.
AIVE plans to fund a third generation of student-built aircraft for the 2026-27 academic year, this time focused on surveillance and mapping missions built around the georeferencing software the company has developed since its spinoff.
The company, born in a UT classroom, built with UT funding and at the hands of UT students, continues to reinvest in the very course that created it.
“They’re getting better every time,” Zwernemann said.
