University of Waterloo students create drone that can help fight fires

A firefighting drone designed by University of Waterloo students was photographed in Wilmot Township on March 1, 2026. (Spencer Turcotte/CTV News)

In the middle of a field in Wilmot Township, a drone powers up and a group of students surrounding it are silent, waiting for an important command.

“Area clear. Wind, weather OK,” said Evan Janakievski, technical director for the Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group (WARG).

Who is WARG? They’re a group of University of Waterloo students who compete annually in the Aerial Evolution Association of Canada’s Student Competition.

In May, they’ll go up against about 20 other Canadian post-secondary schools during the competition in Ottawa.

“They are shifting the theme to urban firefighting,” said Victoria Gee, the team’s operations lead. “This year’s tasks are identifying targets all around a building, moving equipment from one location to another location and extinguishing these targets using water.”

The team made up of mostly engineering students oversaw building the drone from scratch and they’ll be responsible for navigating it using open-source software.

“It allows us to see a lot of statistics from the drone and information,” said Janakievski. “We need to be able to show judges we can identify and extinguish fire targets. It will be identified by coloured pieces of paper.”

Despite their advanced knowledge and skills, they are still students, and have had to do all of this amid their studies.

“We’re still doing our classes and we also have the privilege of being in Waterloo’s co-op system so we have a lot of people coming in and out,” said Gee.

Another thing working against them has been this winter’s weather.

“We really prefer not to fly in any inclement weather,” said Gee.

So they took advantage of the rare sunny day on Monday when CTV News stopped by to get a behind-the-scenes look at their drone testing.

With a couple of months left to fine tune the drone until the competition, the team does have winning on their mind.

But more importantly, they’re excited to think about how their flying robot could help save lives.