Raytheon’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC) gives university students a hands-on engineering challenge built around real-world autonomous systems. The program is designed to develop talent, strengthen university partnerships, and expose students to the kinds of technical and project demands they would encounter in industry. Through the competition, students apply creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving to research, design, integrate, and test an unmanned vehicle system in a professional-style environment. The 2025–2026 competition, Operation Touchdown: Autonomous Navigation, Target Identification, Collaborative Autonomy, requires each team to field at least two fully autonomous vehicles: one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The UAV must launch, scout a field containing obstacles and a destination ArUco marker, identify the target location, and communicate that information directly to the UGV. The UGV then navigates toward the destination while avoiding obstacles, and the UAV lands on the UGV along the way and remains aboard until the mission is complete. Preparing for this challenge builds skills in electromechanical design, embedded systems, sensors, wireless communications, computer vision, cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence, autonomy, command and control, integration and testing, and advanced manufacturing.