On November 3, the 19th "Challenge Cup" National College Students' Extracurricular Academic Science and Technology Works Competition concluded at Nanjing University. The six projects from Tsinghua University that advanced to the main competition finals performed exceptionally, winning a total of five Top Awards and one First Prize. In the "Unveiling the List and Appointing the Best" special track, Tsinghua teams won four "Best Performer" (national first place) titles and seven Top Awards.
Among these achievements, the project titled "Air-Land Integrated Travel: Autonomous Docking and Separation Technology for Modular Flying Cars," led by first-year doctoral student JIA Bo from the School of Vehicle and Mobility, won a Top Award in the main competition. Core team members included LIU Yilin (first-year Ph.D. student, School of Aerospace Engineering), WU Tianle, XI Tiyang, SHEN Hanyu (junior undergraduate, Xingjian College), and WANG Sihan (junior undergraduate, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences). Professor HOU Zhichao from the School of Vehicle and Mobility served as the faculty advisor. This marks the second student team advised by Professor Hou to receive a national "Challenge Cup" Top Award.
The "Air-Land Integrated Travel" project addresses the operational needs of air-ground transport platforms within the context of the low-altitude economy. It proposes a system architecture for modular flying cars, with a key breakthrough in autonomous guided docking and separation technologies between multimodal modules. The project innovatively designed docking mechanisms for pairwise connection among the flight module, the passenger cabin, and the ground module. It proposed and implemented an autonomous guided docking control scheme that integrates GNSS positioning for long-range guidance with Apriltag visual recognition for short-range precision. The MQTT protocol was employed to enable real-time information transmission between modules. Both 2kg and 10kg-level prototypes were developed to validate system reliability.
The outcomes of this project have led to 9 patent applications, of which 2 national invention patents, 3 utility model patents, and 3 design patents have been granted. The project has also received multiple accolades, including the 2025 Capital "Challenge Cup" Top Award, the 42nd Tsinghua University "Challenge Cup" Top Award, the First Prize in the Beijing Division of the 10th China-U.S. Young Maker Competition, and the National Second Prize in the same competition.
The School of Vehicle and Mobility consistently regards the "Challenge Cup" competition as a vital platform for cultivating students' innovative capacity and practical spirit, integrating it as a key component of the talent development system. The School actively organizes faculty members to provide guidance, forms interdisciplinary advising teams, and offers systematic support for students' project development and competition preparation, providing comprehensive, full-process assistance from technical breakthroughs to technology transfer for participating teams.
【Introduction to the "Challenge Cup" National Competition】
The "Challenge Cup" competition is a national, orienting, exemplary, and mass-participation contest co-organized by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, the China Association for Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the All-China Students' Federation, and local governments, jointly initiated by prestigious Chinese universities and news media. Starting from the 17th competition, the "Unveiling the List and Appointing the Best" special track was established. This track operates on a model where enterprises and institutions publish their technical needs ("unveil the list"), the organizing committee invites submissions from universities nationwide ("issue the call"), and student teams compete to provide the best solutions ("compete to undertake the task").
