Inside Kettering University’s Connie and Jim John Recreation Center, middle and high school teams from 10 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces moved constantly between competition fields and tables lined with laptops, controllers, batteries, and replacement parts as they reviewed flight footage, checked drone components, and discussed piloting and autonomous flight performance between Matches.
The activity extended well beyond the competition floor. Teams rehearsed piloting sequences in open space near the fields while others reviewed engineering logbooks and prepared for upcoming rounds.
“You could see students constantly adjusting and responding to problems throughout the day,” said Kim Shumaker, Director of Robotics Outreach & Robotics Center at Kettering. “They weren’t standing on the sidelines watching technology work. They were in the process. Testing things, troubleshooting failures, making decisions under time pressure, and immediately trying again when something didn’t go as planned.”
Coaches occasionally stepped in with guidance, but most revisions happened student-to-student in hurried conversations around laptops and flight footage minutes before teams returned to the field. A missed gate, rough landing, or unstable autonomous sequence usually triggered another round of testing, debate, and revisions before competition resumed.
The event further highlighted Kettering’s growing role in Michigan’s broader robotics and STEM ecosystem through competitions, camps, workshops, and outreach initiatives that connect students with hands-on technical learning earlier in their educational journeys. Support from the GM Community Impact Grant and Magna Grant programs has also helped expand robotics center programming and aerial drone technologies on campus.
As competition rounds wrapped up Friday evening, many students traded laptops, flight footage, and telemetry screens for blankets and lawn chairs outside near the Recreation Center, joining families and spectators gathered across the field.
Shortly after sundown, Firefly Drone Shows launched hundreds of synchronized drones into the night sky above the Kettering University GM Mobility Research Center.
Advanced drones, designed and built by Firefly Drone Shows, now move in coordinated formations overhead, transforming technical precision into a large-scale public light performance visible across campus.
The night’s drone show scaled up many of the same principles students had spent the day testing in competition, with hundreds of drones relying on precise coordination, positioning, timing, and system reliability to move through synchronized formations overhead.
By the end of the night at Kettering University, students had spent the weekend inside an environment built around testing, adaptation, collaboration, and continuous refinement, the same patterns shaping modern engineering and autonomous technology.
