Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group

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WARG

Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group
The WARG logo
The WARG 2025 drones + executive team
Formation	1997
Founder	Dave Kroestsch
Founded at	Waterloo, Ontario
Type	Student Design Team
Purpose	Put something great in the sky
Headquarters	University of Waterloo
Location	Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Products	UAVs
Official language	English
Affiliations	University of Waterloo
Award(s)	AEAC 2024 and 2025 winners
Website	www.uwarg.com/home

Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group (WARG) is a student-led design team, headquartered at the University of Waterloo. WARG specializes in creating unmanned autonomous drones for competition in the annual AEAC,^[1] which they have consecutively won in 2024 and 2025. Presently, they are preparing for the 2026 competition.

WARG was said to be founded in the Fall of 1997, which puts it among the oldest design teams at the University of Waterloo. It was founded by Dave Kroestsch and advised by David Wang.^[2] WARG at this time built a helicopter that was powered by gas.^[3]

In 2004, WARG decided to create a massive airframe, called Hyperion. It featured two three horse-powered electric engines and a 4.3 meter wingspan, the largest that WARG has built ever to date. It took flight around June 2008 after 4 years of development.^[4]

WARG during this time was attending the AEAC competitions, as well as the AUVSI^[5] student competition. Aircraft produced during this time included:

• Project SPIKE
• Project Boreas

From 2015-2017, Chris Hajduk, Serj Babayan, and Eric Field led the team. Some fascinating stories emerged during this time, such as Becky, which originated as a result of a major crash on the original airframe.^[6] Project Hex was also completed, but appeared to crash^[7]

Between 2017-2019, the team struggled in terms of recruitment and direction. This was due to a few reasons:

• People were not coming in as often to work on the drones
• Various projects lacked ownership
• Finances weren't there to support the creation of the drones

In June 2019, the team was closed, and the space that it worked under was given to the faculty. It seemed like the end of the WARG, until...

In Spring 2020, Anthony Berbari, a former new firmware team member, and Lucy Gong, former Safety Captain, alongside David Wang, saw an opportunity to restart the team during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Anthony lost his co-op due to COVID-19, and so restarted the team over the summer. Two other members would also join during this time: Sahil Kale and Shrinjay Mukherjee, both of whom were incoming students. These four formed the core to restart the team.

The 2021 competition saw WARG compete virtually, but they crashed their mainframe. Nevertheless, WARG saw increased membership and interest during this timeframe.

The team was led by Sahil Kale and Shrinjay Mukherjee for the 2022 competition season, and WARG built its first quadcopter, Vanguard. Derek Wright, a professor at the University of Waterloo, joined as faculty advisor as David Wang was retiring soon. The season saw WARG learning much about drone competitions with regards to what they knew and what they didn't.

The team was led by Jinghao (Ray) Lei, Dhruv Upadhyay, and Sahil Kale for the 2023 competition. Anthony (Anni) Luo took on the role as system architect and competition pilot alongside Megan Spee. Core membership shot up to 60+ members, up from 30 in 2021.

At AEAC, WARG made an impression with ICARUS all-black "quad plane" airframe, presenting a 2.4 meter wingspan and weighing just over 15 kg.

Under the new leadership of Megan Spee, Daniel Puratich, and Anthony Luo, WARG turned their attention to a different strategy. Struggles at and prior to the 2023 competition showed a need for incremental progress and a consistent testing platform that could double as a long-term competition airframe.

The development of Project Pegasus was a result of:

• Getting a new workspace
• Advancement of the flight test program
• A newfound focus on strategy

It was a simple quad weighing 9 kg at competition. With Nathan Green being pilot and technical director, WARG achieved first place at AEAC 2024.^[8]

Under the leadership of Daniel Puratich, Megan Spee, and Nathan Green, the team decided to separate learning projects and competition projects. This led to continued development of the fully custom ZeroPilot flight controller, and an experimental fixed wing program, Eclipse, to continue in parallel with the competition system.

WARG brought on Brandon J. Dehart, a former member turned faculty member, as a faculty advisor. Georgia Westerlund replaced Megan's position as executive director for Fall 2024, the team completed the successful maiden flight of the Pegasus 2 airframe, eight months prior to competition. This left plenty of time to focus on validating solutions for the AEAC 2025 competition requirements.^[9]

This was also the first year where WARG flew multiple drones at the competition after learning that WARG was able to. This led to another victory at AEAC 2025.

Daniel Puratich and Nathan Green stepped down from their roles to focus on their capstone design project. Taking the mantle is Alison Thompson and Evan Janakievski

The official cheer for WARG is:
On 3 a 1, 2, 3 - pineapple

Effective 2022. The reasons for this are as follows:

• One of the founders, Sahil, hated pineapple on pizza. However, when faced with the possibility of not being able to compete due to a paperwork screwup, he stated that he would endorse pineapples on pizza if WARG was able to compete. Permission was granted, and Sahil endorsed it.
• The same competition, Sahil stated that he would consume pineapple pizza if the drone did not crash at the end of the event. While the drone collided with a barrel, the drone landed in one piece. Once again, hailing the pineapple is believed to improve WARG's chances of not crashing.^[10]

Thus, saying "pineapple" brings good luck to WARG's aircrafts.

Sometime in July 2022, Sahil bought a pineapple plush from Amazon after going on a Discord voice call for firmware. It was much smaller than he imagined, but nevertheless, he decided that it would be the official mascot of the team. It has been featured on numerous drones that WARG has created ever since.