An Interdisciplinary Student Contest for Global Impact
CareDrone is a student-led, interdisciplinary contest hosted under the CITRIS umbrella, based at UC Santa Cruz.
Project Overview
CareDrone is a student-led, interdisciplinary contest hosted under the CITRIS umbrella, based at UC Santa Cruz. This initiative engages university and high school students in collaboratively designing and building open-source, fixed-wing drones optimized for real-world applications such as agricultural spraying, medical supply delivery, and environmental data collection.
Through the challenge structure, students not only develop engineering skills but also explore the ethical, political, environmental, and sociological contexts of drone deployments in rural Africa and Latin America. By requiring interdisciplinary collaboration, CareDrone serves as a gateway to STEM for students from all backgrounds.
Oscar Pasotti Schoenman, a high school student and tech innovator, leads the project. Lakoi Takona, a drone entrepreneur with direct experience from drone deployments in Malawi and Kenya, connects the program with partners there.
What the contest sets out to do
Teams develop open-source, fixed-wing drones optimized for field application. The platform is designed for medical delivery and carries vaccines, blood and emergency supplies. Later extensions may reach agricultural use, such as pesticide spraying and multispectral imaging. They may also cover environmental sensing of air quality, climate and soil moisture.
Each high school fields its own team, supported by UCSC students from technical and non-technical disciplines including engineering, environmental science, sociology, design and public health, and by UCSC faculty where they are available. As an extracurricular initiative the contest gives students hands-on technical experience along with practice in collaboration, project planning and design optimization.
The top-performing design is deployed as part of the contest award package. Pilot programs are under discussion in Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania.
Field Deployment and Use Cases
Winning teams test their drones in real-world deployment. We develop the field-testing program with NGOs and community organizations in the pilot countries.
In addition to delivery functions, drones may also be used or adapted later for gathering key environmental data, especially in data-sparse regions. As such, this project contributes to climate resilience efforts, public health infrastructure, and food system improvement.
Registration
Registration opens in December 2026. Write to caredrone.project@gmail.com.