University of Seoul’s CDSL@UOS Team Wins MathWorks Minidrone Competition

The CDSL@UOS team from the University of Seoul won the MathWorks Minidrone Competition at the IFAC World Congress 2026, repeating its victory from 2023. The team comprised doctoral and master’s students Lee Hyo-bin and Lee Do-hyeon, and undergraduate Park Geon.

The competition, held since 2018, challenges university teams to build autonomous-flight systems using MathWorks’ MATLAB and Simulink. A minidrone must take off on its own, recognise flight paths and targets marked on the ground, follow the route in real time and land precisely at the target.

The task requires teams to run image processing, path generation and control algorithms efficiently on a drone with limited computing power. Sixty-three university teams from around the world entered the 2026 event through a remote simulation qualifying round, with six advancing to the final.

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I think this achievement resulted from the students’ intense efforts to study complex control theory and apply it to real engineering problems.

CDSL@UOS refined a computationally efficient Pure Pursuit path-generation algorithm and integrated it with image processing. The approach produced strong autonomous-flight performance and earned the team the final victory.

Professor Park Kyung-hoon, who advised the team, said the result reflected the students’ intense work applying complex control theory to real engineering problems. Team leader Lee Do-hyeon said the most valuable lesson was being able to take theory and implement it on real hardware from beginning to end.

The IFAC World Congress, held every three years, took place from August 23 to 28, 2026, at BEXCO in Busan. About 4,400 people attended the event, described as the largest in its history.

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As people who study control, the most valuable lesson for us was being able to go through the process of putting theory onto real hardware from beginning to end.