This is the repository. If you just joined, or you are helping someone who just joined, start here instead of digging through chat.
We are SOMARS, the autonomous-drone team at UC Santa Cruz. The name in the somars-ucsc.com footer is Slugs for the Oversight and Management of Aerial Robotic Systems.
| You want | Open |
|---|---|
| Who we are | This page |
| The aircraft that just flew | caligula/README.md |
| The next aircraft | electrum/README.md |
| A skill, in order | resources/general-skills/README.md |
| A part | resources/components/components.md |
| What kind of aircraft is this | resources/drones/2-quadcopter.md |
| Paste a prompt into an agent | scripts-and-prompts/README.md |
| How we use AI | AI-usage.md |
| How we treat each other | RULES.md |
| This week's notes | meeting-documentation/README.md |
Flight code is not in this repo. Flight software is github.com/Slugbotics/somars_autonomous. That repository is private, and it will be made public. The monorepo is github.com/Slugbotics/SOMARS. It exists, and it is not the working tree yet.
Caligula is the carbon quadrotor that flew this year. Caligula I went to C-UASC at Mojave. Caligula II flew SUAS at Tulsa in September 2026. We are done with Caligula in December 2026.
The next aircraft is Electrum, a quad fixed-wing VTOL. Almost nothing about that aircraft is written down yet.
somars-ucsc.com lists four labels: Mechanical, Embedded Systems, Perception, and Simulations. In this repository there are three working groups. Perception is the name for the camera, the detector, and the map, and that work sits under Embedded Systems.
- Mechanical
- Embedded Systems, including perception
- Simulations
Email on the site: slugbots@ucsc.edu
Warning
TODO: Discord invite URL.
| Competition | What the public site says |
|---|---|
| C-UASC, Collegiate Unmanned Aircraft Systems Competition | Caligula I, Mojave, 2026. Next: June 2027, six missions (waypoints, a timed circuit, package drop, delivery and recovery, target localization). |
| SUAS, Student Unmanned Aerial Systems, AUVSI / RoboNation | Caligula II, Tulsa, September 2026. One command, then waypoint laps, a survey, target detection, and a winch delivery inside 45 minutes. |
- A page in this repo, or the technical design report it links.
- somars-ucsc.com and the website repo.
- A datasheet linked from the component page.
If those disagree, the page keeps both and a TODO. It does not average them.
- Team site: somars-ucsc.com
- Git and editor setup, a separate GitHub repo: SoftwareOnboarding2025
- UCSC quarter dates, for meeting notes and doc-sweep commits: registrar calendar