FAU students win drone racing national and state titles
Cypress Speeds won the middle school national title in Detroit, and Five Elements added a runner-up finish, giving FAU Lab Schools a sweep across state and national stages.
FAU Lab Schools turned a Detroit championship weekend into a two-team statement, with A.D. Henderson University School and FAU High School collecting top honors at both the state and national levels. The performance at XPONENTIAL 2026 showed more than speed, it showed a program built on design discipline, racing execution and depth across multiple squads.
The headline result belonged to Cypress Speeds, coached by Tucker Hindle. Aleksandr Bitkin, Thomas Oates, William Oates, Sean O'Sullivan and Ishaan Venkatesh won the Middle School National Championship at the Drones in School National Championships in Detroit, and FAU said their team score topped every high school competitor at the event as well. That cross-division edge is the kind of marker that matters in FPV, because it suggests a group that was not just winning its bracket but operating at a level that would have challenged older pilots too.
Cypress Speeds also won national top honors in marketing video, portfolio and display, engineering and design, head-to-head racing and innovation. Those category wins point to a team that understood how these events are scored beyond the stopwatch. In Drones in School, students build and race FPV drones while working through CAD, 3D printing, iterative design and other STEM applications, and Cypress Speeds appeared to translate that classroom process into a complete competitive package.
FAU’s other team, Five Elements, made the school’s Detroit trip even deeper. Christian Cardona, Robert Arutyunyan, Dhanush Shankar, Talinn Sundaram and Camden Swisher finished as national runners-up after winning the 2026 Florida State Championship in the middle school division. Five Elements also brought home the Capture-the-Flag award, the Excellence Award and the People’s Choice Award, giving the program another podium run that reached well beyond pure racing performance.
Lauren Robinson, the school’s principal, said she was excited to see the students excel on the state and national stage and credited their success to “countless hours of hard work, creativity, collaboration and determination.” That mix of racing results and project-based awards is what made the FAU showing stand out: the teams were not only fast, they were polished in presentation, engineering and event execution.
The Florida path to Detroit was competitive before the first national heat ever started. The 2026 Florida Championship was held April 24 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s ICI Center in Daytona Beach, and Drones in School said the top 40 teams in the state were invited. The state and national results fit a longer pattern for Florida Atlantic Laboratory Schools, which sent four teams to the 2023 national competition in Denver and finished first through fourth among middle school squads.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
