UAV Engineering Bootcamp 2026: winning with Orion
Date:
Participant Bootcamp and hackathon In person Kyiv, Ukraine
Kyiv Aviation Institute
I participated in the Navigation track at UAV Engineering Bootcamp 2026 at Kyiv Aviation Institute. The in-person programme ran in Kyiv from June 29 to July 7, 2026. Our team, Viklyk, won the hackathon with Orion.
The programme’s State Estimation & Navigation track covered position estimation from GPS and inertial sensors, including Kalman filtering and sensor fusion. Practical engineering tasks and field tests were central to the bootcamp.
Orion is our four-node radio-navigation prototype for situations where one node loses access to GNSS. It estimates that node’s position using radio ranges to peers that still have GNSS. My work included firmware and radio integration, along with telemetry tools for field testing and analysis.
Read the Orion project post for the design, field-test results, and details of my contribution.
The bootcamp brought together 72 participants who worked across engineering tracks to build seven UAVs. Anna Shtopenko’s report for Oboronka describes the workshop sessions and final flight tests.