Three Biola engineering seniors spent nine months turning a Campus Safety request into a flying prototype.

Before he died in August 2025, John Ojeisekhoba, then Biola University's chief of campus safety, described a problem to the engineering faculty: his officers could not easily see into the campus's hard-to-reach corners, and during graduation weekends and football games, when foot traffic spiked, that blind spot mattered. He handed engineering faculty a need, not a spec sheet.

Three engineering seniors, Jordyn Fazekas, Nathan Griffin and Tyler Hill, picked it up as their senior capstone project (ENGR 470/471). Dr. Yohan Lee, associate dean of technology in Biola's School of Science, Technology and Health (SSTH), served as primary client, with Chief Randy Chung, Ojeisekhoba's successor, as secondary client. Todd Curtis, professor of engineering, led a four-person advising team with Terry Kim, Caleb Houser and Matthew Snyder. The students had nine months, full design authority and no finished product to reverse-engineer. What they built is now called the O Drone.

The Requirement

Ojeisekhoba's ask was closer to a mission statement than an engineering brief: give Campus Safety a way to survey areas officers couldn't easily reach on foot, and support security response during large events. Neither constraint came with numbers attached. The students had to convert "hard-to-reach" and "respond faster" into testable specifications: a 1.1-pound payload capacity and a 20-minute loiter time.

The Build

The team designed all 236 of the O Drone's structural parts and manufactured them in-house: 3D-printed PLA and ASA, laser-cut BC plywood, aluminum tubing. The electronics were commercial off-the-shelf, a Raspberry Pi 5 for payload operations and a Pixhawk 6C for flight control, wired to GPS, telemetry, LiDAR and Remote ID hardware through hand-soldered custom connections. That split let the team spend its design hours on the part no vendor could sell them: a payload bay that swaps modules through a rail-and-spring mount and two USB-C ports, one for data, one for power. Fazekas described the pace bluntly: "There was a lot of trial and error, especially in the later stages of development." The first module built for that bay was a thermal camera, a TOPDON TC001 that press-fits onto the same rail and streams video to Campus Safety's ground control station.

Testing and Results

Six requirement tests, six passes. The airframe held through 50 full throttle-cycle fatigue tests without failure. Loaded to its full 1.1-pound payload spec, the drone cleared a thrust-to-weight ratio of 2.17, above the team's 2.0 minimum. Unloaded, it held loiter flight for 31.08 minutes against a 20-minute requirement, and a module swap took under 10 seconds. Those numbers turn "swappable payload drone" from a design concept into a system Campus Safety can deploy.

The Team

No one assigned the three students a project manager. Curtis and the advising team guided; Lee and Chung, as clients, defined the requirement and signed off on the result. The students owned everything in between: turning "survey hard-to-reach areas" into a payload bay, an airframe and a flight test. That distinction, between being taught how a drone works and being responsible for whether one flies, is most of what a capstone is supposed to teach.

What It Demonstrates

Biola's engineering program measures capstones against a specific bar: how quickly a student can move from coursework to independent, client-ready work. The O Drone is a direct illustration: a real client brought a real, ambiguous problem to an undergraduate team, who owned the design, absorbed the failures and delivered a tested, working system without a faculty member designing it for them.

The Human Edge: AI can help design a drone. The harder challenge is taking an ambiguous problem, making decisions without a playbook, working through failure, and taking responsibility for something that actually works. That is what three Biola engineers spent nine months proving they could do.

In Memory

Ojeisekhoba did not see the O Drone fly. He raised the challenge and unfortunately passed in August 2025, before Lee and Chung formally sponsored the capstone that carried it forward. The students dedicated the finished drone to him. Read the full story of Chief Ojeisekhoba and the O Drone on Biola News →

Capstone Context

The O Drone is one project in Biola's 2026 senior capstone cohort, alongside a Smart Greenhouse project from the same graduating class. Each team worked from a real external requirement rather than a simulated one, a structural choice in how Biola's engineering program runs its capstone year.

What's Next

The team has already scoped its next iteration: carbon fiber arms to cut structural weight, video transmission for first-person-view monitoring and a landing-leg suspension system to reduce breakage on hard landings. Separately, Southern California defense startups and U.S. Air Force UAS programs have expressed interest in aspects of Biola's drone-production capability, according to Biola News, an early signal worth watching as the capstone track continues producing fielded hardware.

For a prospective engineering student, the question the O Drone answers isn't "can Biola students build a drone." It's what happens when nobody hands you the answer. That's the same test waiting at a first engineering job, where a manager describes a problem, not a solution, and expects the engineer to close the gap. Biola's capstone year puts students through that gap once, with faculty advising instead of directing, before they hit it with a paycheck on the line.

Study Engineering at Biola

The O Drone started as an ambiguous problem and nine months of undergraduate ownership. Study Engineering at Biola →