Army-funded UCF research tackles a tricky moment for amphibious drones

Story by UCF

June 25, 2026

Birds break from the ocean and rays leap into the air without seeming to think about it. For drones built to do the same, that hop from water to sky is one of the toughest things to pull off. Researchers at the University of Central Florida are now digging into why — and what it would take to make the move dependable.

Associate Professor Samik Bhattacharya and aerospace engineering master’s student Dominic Polidoro are studying the forces a wing meets as it leaves the water and enters the air, a moment engineers call egress. Their nine-month project is funded by the DEVCOM Army Research Office, and the goal is practical: build mathematical models that help the military’s amphibious vehicles handle that transition with more stability and control.

The payoff wouldn’t stop at defense. The same understanding could widen the use of amphibious drones in coastal search-and-rescue, ocean monitoring and disaster response — situations where a single aircraft that moves cleanly between water and air beats hauling separate vehicles. As Bhattacharya puts it, the work could one day “enable seamless air-water operations without the need for separate vehicles.”

The hard part is what happens the instant a wing leaves the water. Lift tends to spike, then drop off sharply, and that swing can destabilize an aircraft and cost the operator control. Plenty of research has looked at how drones enter water; far less explains how they get back out. Bhattacharya says pinning down the cause would let designers build wings that either use that lift surge or smooth it out.

To watch the process up close, the team runs experiments in UCF’s Experimental Fluid Mechanics Lab, where a water tank and 3D-printed wings reveal how waves, surface deformation and swirling vortices play off one another as a wing breaks the surface. Those effects are tough to separate because they happen at once and on very short timescales. The pair presented early results at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum this past January.

Bhattacharya, who joined UCF in 2016, holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Ohio State University.

Learn more about how UCF researchers are studying wing shapes to advance amphibious drone technology.