Goa University students build QuadCopter, will be cheaper than Netra UAV

[SRP]

A team of gadget geeks from Goa University’s electronics department have built their own version of an Unmanned Surveillance Vehicle (UAV) —a 1.2 kg QuadCopter or four-rotor helicopter as their final year project. While QuadCopters are being constructed and researched extensively by the armed forces across the world, the GU team’s device, named Aditya is unique because it was built from scratch on a budget of only 30,000.

The zippy little craft however is a work in progress and its creators, the team of eight final year MSc Electronics students, will push for a patent once they perfect their ‘flight mechanism’.

“Aditya weighs 1.2kg and has a payload capacity of 200g. It has been successfully tested for vertical take-off and landing operations,” said Kevin D’Souza, 22, one of the students who developed the device. “It can fly in a radius of 200m and fly to heights of 15-20m, for 20 minutes on a single battery charge,” he added.

The inspiration for the craft came from the Bollywood flick ’3 Idiots’, where Aamir Khan and his cronies are shown using a QuadCopter with an attached video camera to spy on their hostel-mates. The device used in the movie was actually a prototype of ‘Netra’, the UAV built by a group of young IIT Bombay grads, in collaboration with the Defence Research and Development Organization. “The UAV developed by DRDO and IIT’s incubation centre cost around 20 lakh, as it was a military-grade device. Our students designed their own flight mechanism and wrote their own programming, managing to develop a UAV on a shoestring budget of 30,000,” explained Rajendra S Gad, associate professor at GU and the team’s mentor on the project.

The design work was carried out by Kevin D’Souza, Laximikant Naik, Wenzel D’Souza, Saish Sawant, Harshad Vaidya, Ravikant Naik, Sawni Netravalkar and Niyati Salgaonkar. They were guided by Rajendra S Gad, Jivan Parab and Prof G M Naik.

“The students had to design the copter as well as the programming from scratch, and then improve it through trial and error over the past two years, because they did not really have any model to follow— nothing is documented and most QuadCopter designs are patented,” he said. The department of electronics has approached the National Aeronautics Laboratory (NAL) in Bangalore to help perfect Aditya’s design and performance.

“In the past decade, governments have realized the need for such aircraft with greater maneuverability and hovering capacity. They prove indispensable in crowd management, event monitoring, security, anti-terrorist operations, and hostage situations and even to find victims of disasters like the Uttarakhand floods,” explained Prof Gad.

DRDO’s QuadCopter, Netra is currently being used by the CRPF, the Ahmedabad and Maharashtra police forces and the BSF for various operations.

Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar had recently attended a demonstration of Netra and wanted to know if the engineers could modify it to track and follow vehicles or pick up GPS signals. He expressed interest in procuring the device to monitor the extent of illegal mining and for security surveillance.

Goa University students build QuadCopter, will be cheaper than Netra UAV | idrw.org