Four graduate students of Prof. Shim, the “Godfather of Autonomous Drone Racing,” clinched third place, winning a prize of $112,250 at the world’s premier drone racing competition—where drones must navigate indoor gate courses using only an onboard monocular camera.

Drone racing, a fast-growing e-sport, features high-speed flights through a series of gates, with pilots relying solely on real-time video streamed from onboard cameras. It highlights the incredible visio-muscular coordination and control capabilities of human pilots. Recently, however, autonomous drone racing—where drones must fly without human input using only onboard sensors—has been attracting significant attention.

On April 12, 2025, the A2RL Drone Racing Challenge was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, marking the largest autonomous drone racing event since the AlphaPilot competition hosted by Lockheed Martin in 2019. Dozens of teams from around the world applied, and 14 teams were selected through qualifiers, with eight advancing to the finals. The competition took place in an indoor arena measuring 80 by 50 meters and consisted of several challenges: a time trial to fly through eleven gates as quickly as possible, a multi-race where the top four teams raced simultaneously, a human-vs-AI showdown against top human pilots, and a head-to-head drag race where two drones raced toward each other from opposite ends.

A defining feature of this competition was the strict constraint that the drones must fly using only a monocular onboard camera, without access to GPS or external sensors. This required high-precision indoor localization and agile flight control. To address this, the team developed a visual-inertial odometry augmented with pre-measured gate positions to achieve more accurate localization. For flight control, they employed a model predictive control (MPC) framework to generate aggressive yet safe flight trajectories.

Prof. Shim’s team implemented their algorithm on the competition-provided drone platform, drawing upon their extensive experience developing custom drone control boards, LiDAR-based localization, nonlinear flight control strategies, and MPC-based planning. Despite the short development timeline and limited resources, the team conducted intensive experiments to validate their system—culminating in an impressive third place world ranking, especially considering their small team size.

Prof. Shim’s lab is considered as the top research group in Korea on perception, decision-making, and control for drones and autonomous vehicles. In 2016, Prof. Shim created the world’s first Autonomous Drone Racing competition at IROS, the leading international robotics conference—earning him a reputation as a pioneer in autonomous drone racing. He later led teams to a thridplace finish in AlphaPilot (2019), and another second-place finish at NeurIPS’ Game of Drones. At Korea’s national AI Grand Challenge, his team secured first place in both 2019 and 2020, earning follow-up research funding totaling 2.4 billion KRW (approx. $1.8M).

In recognition of his contributions, Prof. Shim received the 2021 Minister’s Commendation from Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT for excellence in AI. In June of 2025, he was elected as Co-Chair of the on aerial robotics, continuing to lead global research efforts in autonomous aerial systems.