Münevver Busenur Şengül and Merve Akgül, senior students in the Department of Software Engineering at Istanbul Gelişim University (IGU), outperformed other competing teams with the project they developed as part of the SAYZEK-ATP 2025–2026 Program—a collaboration between the Presidency of Defense Industries and the Council of Higher Education—and earned the right to present a poster.
“Gökbörü” Team Invited to the Final Gathering
The evaluation process conducted as part of the SAYZEK-ATP 2025–2026 | From Thesis to Technology: Final Gathering, organized in collaboration with the Presidency of Defense Industries and the Council of Higher Education, has been completed.
Istanbul Gelişim University students Münevver Busenur Şengül and Merve Akgül, under the team name “Gökbörü,” with their project titled “Advanced Image Processing-Based Threat Detection and Evasion System for Autonomous Aerial Systems,” outperformed other teams that applied in the same project category and earned the right to present a poster at the Final Gathering.
As a result of the evaluations conducted within the program, 18 individual students and 20 teams—covering 31 different thesis and project topics—qualified to present posters, and a total of 68 students, including those on the teams, were invited to the Final Gathering.
Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Threat Detection and Autonomous Evasion System
The project aims to enable autonomous aerial vehicles to detect airborne objects in their vicinity—such as drones, airplanes, and helicopters—in real time, assess potential threats and collision risks, and make safe evasion decisions when necessary.
Within the scope of this study, target detection, target tracking, temporal behavior analysis, friend-or-foe verification, collision risk calculation, and autonomous evasion mechanisms were addressed within an integrated system architecture using image processing and artificial intelligence methods.
While air targets are detected using artificial intelligence on images captured by a stereo camera, the targets’ movements and the time remaining until a collision are analyzed. The results of behavioral anomaly and threat assessments are evaluated alongside the verification of friendly elements to generate autonomous evasion decisions, which are then transmitted to the flight control system.
To Be Presented at the Project Final Meeting
The project, carried out under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Serkan Gönen, a faculty member in the Department of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at İGÜ, was selected as one of the projects eligible to present a poster following the SAYZEK-ATP 2025–2026 evaluation process.
Münevver Busenur Şengül and Merve Akgül will present their projects to representatives of defense industry firms, engineers, academics, mentors, and field experts as part of the “From Thesis to Technology: Final Meeting” to be held in Ankara.
Another Proud Achievement from IGU
The project, which combines autonomous aerial systems, image processing, artificial intelligence, and reinforcement learning technologies, aims to contribute to enhancing the situational awareness and flight safety of aerial vehicles.
While Istanbul Gelişim University continues to support its students through an innovative and practice-oriented educational approach, this success achieved by the students in a competitive evaluation process once again underscores the university’s vision of contributing to national technology and cultivating qualified human resources.
