A drone that chooses its own emergency landing, accepted at an IEEE conference

Detecting that a drone is in trouble is not the same as knowing what it should do next. Amaay turned his idea into Skyshield, a decision layer that takes motion-sensor evidence and the vehicle's current state and picks one of seven emergency actions. It first rules out actions the drone physically cannot perform, then ranks the rest by modeled consequences. He evaluated it at serious scale: 4.2 million paired decisions, 209 full-flight replays, 450 matched PX4 and Gazebo simulation runs, and a replay of physical sensor recordings.

FIELDAerospace & Robotics

RESULTFirst-author paper accepted at an IEEE conference

VENUEIEEE, 2026

Amaay Gupta, YRI FellowIEEE

BEFORE THE FELLOWSHIP

A 12th grader at Jodhamal Public School in Jammu, India who had started building Skyshield, a UAV crash response idea, on his own.

AFTER

First author of the Skyshield paper, a full decision framework for drone emergencies evaluated across millions of simulated decisions, accepted at an IEEE conference.

THE LEDGER

01First-author paper accepted at an IEEE conference

02Evaluated across 4.2 million paired consequence-model decisions

03450 matched PX4 and Gazebo simulation runs, all commands acknowledged

04Median classifier latency of 1.48 ms on physical sensor replay

05Turned a self-started project into a peer-reviewed system

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