Students at Saint Louis University have competed in the annual Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) competition hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) for the past several years. In this competition, university and high school level student teams compete by enabling an unmanned aircraft to autonomously complete mission objectives such as waypoint navigation, target detection, and payload deployment. Participation in the competition provides students with hands on experience and collaboration with other students of various disciplines such as aerospace/mechanical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science. Since Saint Louis University's first participation in the competition in 2015, the student team has been using an aircraft designed by a senior design team from 2015. However, as the mission objectives of the competition have changed over the years, the aircraft required off-design modifications for successful mission completion. For this reason, the objective of this senior design project is to provide a reliable fixed-wing aircraft capable of autonomous flight for the student team at Saint Louis University that will last the next five years. The project itself consists of the design, analysis, fabrication, and testing of the new aircraft to ensure that the student competition team has access to a reliable aircraft that will allow them to achieve competitive ranking in future SUAS competitions.

Srikanth Gururajan has had a significant influence on the project as he not only served as the instructor for the aerospace engineering senior design teams, but he also acted as the design team's customer. As Dr. Gururajan has overseen the student team that competes in the SUAS competition, the design team worked closely with him in the design phase of the project when establishing the requirements for the new competition aircraft. With the advice and feedback from Dr. Gururajan, the project has been able to reach a higher level of success than it otherwise would have.