When Adailton Nali Junior, then a fourth-year electrical and computer engineering major, was choosing a senior capstone project at UC Santa Barbara, one option stood out immediately. Sponsored by Raytheon, an RTX business, the project challenged students to build a mission-ready autonomous delivery system, pairing a drone with a ground vehicle, then put it to the test against teams from three other California universities. 

The project combined electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and an awareness of the environmental factors that the finished product would need to navigate. 

“When it was time to make a decision,” he said, “I put it as number one.”

Nine months later, his team won the West Coast division of Raytheon’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC), continuing a remarkable UCSB streak: the university has taken first place in each of the competition’s first three years. 

The trophies tell only part of the story. For UCSB students, the yearlong project has become a unique immersive introduction to the way engineering happens in industry, complete with multidisciplinary teams, shifting requirements, technical setbacks, deadlines, and mentorship from engineering professionals.

“My manager told me the product development experience I got from the project was perfectly aligned with the skills they needed at the company, which ultimately landed me the job,” said Junior, who recently accepted a systems engineering position in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

A Competition Begins

Raytheon’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition started first in the Dallas area in 2020, with four universities developing an unmanned vehicle. Another competition in Puerto Rico followed. In 2023, Raytheon added competitions on the east and west coasts. Now, 24 university teams around the country spend their school year building drones and ground vehicles to compete each year.

But the competition isn’t really about the drone, said Leonard Chen, director of technology development for Raytheon. “The emphasis is on the challenge,” he said. 

The assignment changes from year to year, forcing students to build systems capable of responding to new conditions rather than simply repeating a previous design. One year, drones had to find a marker on a field using a random search pattern, communicate the location to a delivery vehicle, which then delivered a first-aid package to the marker. Another year, drones had to land on moving vehicles while ground vehicles navigated obstacles, all without GPS.

From tracking objects to computer engineering to AI, Chen said, “these challenges are really meant to encompass technology areas that Raytheon is interested in.”

The experience also gives students a feel for what it’s like to work in engineering in a broader sense. “I mean, forget about the technologies. How do you work as a team? How do you have people from all these different disciplines and backgrounds and, in a short amount of time, get them all working together?” Chen said. “It’s providing a real-world experience of what we face within our own company, in a very fun and challenging venue.”

Mentoring in Focus

One of the benefits of the competition is that students get the help of a mentor from Raytheon as they design their autonomous vehicle. For the ECE and mechanical engineering majors at UCSB, they have the added bonus of having a mentor who’s been in their shoes. Ryan Conolley, who received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ECE from UCSB, is now a chief engineer at Raytheon who spends every Friday afternoon during the school year on campus, advising the UCSB capstone team.

As a master’s student in the mid-2000s, Conolley worked with Chen at Raytheon, which sponsored his master’s project. When Chen started talking about bringing the AVC contest to the West Coast, the timing was perfect. “I was already thinking about ways of giving back to the school and to grad students,” Conolley said, “and Len was starting up this capstone effort with Raytheon and looking for mentors.”

The connection between Raytheon and UCSB continues to strengthen through the program. Several previous Raytheon AVC capstone students have gone on to get jobs at Raytheon, and, in turn, become part of the AVC mentoring team. Other previous team members have also joined the mentoring team after graduation, meeting several times a week with students as the competition nears.

“The mentors are really a game-changer,” said Junior, who received his ECE degree in 2025. Along with guiding students as they worked on their projects, the mentors became resources for career advice. “I could ask them about their jobs and the types of skills that were important for me to learn,” he said. “The mentors are there to truly help you.”

This support is reciprocal, Conolley said. Each year, he brings students to Raytheon’s Goleta facility to present their final projects to his colleagues. “It creates morale for the mentors and for other people at Raytheon,” he said. “It shows employees that Raytheon cares about the community, and that if you want to get involved in a mentoring project, here’s one that you can get involved with.”

The engineers at Raytheon — both in the office and at the West Coast Competition, held this year at Santa Barbara City College — are typically wowed by the students’ work. The most recent competition gave bonus points to teams that used AI in their design to help their drone identify obstacles on the field.

“The idea that we pushed forward was you could tie your camera feed into the AI chip and have it identify things for you,” Conolley said. “That’s an added super-hard challenge beyond just the normal hard challenges. And UCSB was the only school out of all 24 schools across the country to fully execute and complete the AI portion of the challenge.” 

The judges gave the student who led the AI component of the project a special award. “It was really impressive,” he said.

A Year of Learning

The competition may provide the most visible moment of the year, but the day-to-day work on the capstone project is what builds the skills that carry students into successful careers. 

“At the beginning of the year, I tell them that this capstone project is probably their most important class they will ever take in their four years,” Conolley said. From developing an AI-driven drone with video capabilities to running an engineering team’s weekly meetings, students get experiences that they can talk about in interviews and lean on in the workplace. “There's nothing else like it in a four-year undergrad program,.”

For Junior, who served as project lead during the 2024-25 academic year, one of the biggest adjustments was moving away from the structure of a traditional class. 

“Going from doing homework and having people give you deadlines to having to be self-motivated and set your own deadlines,” he said, “knowing that it depends on you to solve unexpected problems that appear along the way, and to make sure that the project gets delivered to a high standard — this is how a real company works.”

He encouraged future capstone students that the time they spend on the capstone project will be worth it. “You’ll get as much out of it as you put into it,” he said. “As hard as it was, seeing the project work at the competition was incredibly rewarding. And looking back, I can see how every lesson I learned bringing it to life shaped me into the engineer I am today.”