Maryland Students Placed Third in NASA Drone Challenge
A student-designed agricultural drone system seeks to automate soybean pest scouting and cut chemical applications.
Updated on Oct. 10, 2026 in Space
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Team Galaxy, a consortium of students from four Maryland public high schools, earned third place in the 2025-2026 NASA Aeronautics Dream with Us Design Challenge. The group developed a specialized uncrewed aerial system to manage pest damage beneath dense crop canopies.
Why it matters
Traditional agricultural scouting fails to reach insects damaging soybean pods beneath the canopy, necessitating inefficient blanket pesticide spraying. This system offers a precise alternative by automating data collection for an industry worth $115.8 billion annually.
The TG-1, a Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) system, utilizes a Reverse Periscope RGB-D sensor to navigate 15- to 30-inch canopy gaps. It uses a 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm to collect samples, targeting an 80% reduction in sampling time and a 60% decrease in chemical usage.
The players
Team Galaxy
A consortium of students from four Maryland public high schools that developed the TG-1 uncrewed agricultural drone.
University of Maryland Extension
The outreach arm of the university that provided the engineering and agronomic guidance used in the drone design.
NASA
The federal agency overseeing the Aeronautics Dream with Us Design Challenge to foster student innovation in aerospace.
The details
The VTOL aircraft—a craft that takes off and lands vertically without a runway—maneuvers through dense vegetation to access areas inaccessible to overhead drones. The onboard RGB-D sensor, which captures standard red-green-blue imagery plus depth data, enables navigation within restricted canopy geometry. Once beneath the leaves, the 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm—a mechanical manipulator with six distinct axes of movement—performs targeted sample collection of insect pests.
Timeline
2025-2026: Team Galaxy competed in the NASA Aeronautics Dream with Us Design Challenge.
2025: Maryland farmers planted 495,000 acres of soybeans.
The Tech Race
This project joins a competitive field of agricultural robotics aiming to reduce reliance on broad-spectrum chemical pesticides. It follows the research trajectory set by the NASA Aeronautics Dream with Us Design Challenge, focusing on autonomous data collection in dense canopy environments.
The system is currently a research-stage design, but it targets a reduction in chemical costs for Maryland farmers managing nearly $200 million in annual soybean crops. If successful in commercial transition, it would replace manual scouting workflows with automated, depth-sensing drone flight.
The takeaway
The project demonstrates a high-precision approach to pest management that could lower operating costs for soybean producers. Readers should watch for future updates on the team's testing results, as the researchers seek to transition the TG-1 from a competition prototype to a field-ready tool.
Further reading
For more on the current trajectory of regional aerospace innovation, visit the Space section.
Source note: This article includes information reported by The Bay Net.
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