UAS-DTU is a team of undergraduate students of Delhi Technological University, devoted
to developing indegenous technological solutions for UAV's. Our
Ultimate Goal is to reduce India's reliance on COTS products and foreign
UAVs. Focusing on
humanitarian uses of UAVs, we are developing a new generation of
low-cost Image Processing Paradigms and Flight Control Systems to aid
in Surveillance and Reconnaissance. The Team, under mentorship and funding from Lockheed Martin,
is the first to develop a Next Generation Urban U.A.S. - Aarush X1,
that is tailor-made for surveillance in urban jungles like Delhi and
Mumbai.
The Team comprises of the following broad departmental classification:
- Airframe: These guys are responsible for the design and fabrication of the aircraft/ airframe. The process primarily involves C.F.D. and F.E.M analyses followed by a detailed C.A.D of the final frame.
- Imagery : The Imagery team takes care of the machine vision. They make sure that we have the best vision system, matched with good software for image enhancement. They also develop image processing software that help in target identification without human intervention.
- Flight Control: This group makes the aircraft autonomous. The prime responsibilities are integration of avionics into the airframe, and familiarisation with autopilot systems available to the Team. Moreover, a sub-group of these guys is also involved with the development of plugins for the Ground Station Interface available to the Team
The
nature of our work requires that we conduct regular test flights. For
this the team travels to either Sohna or Karnal every weekend or so. The
test flights have pre-defined objectives that are agreed upon during
the team meetings. All the team members are handed specific tasks for
the various stages of the flight day, in a pre-flight brief. A
post-flight analysis is done to discuss thoughts, issues and comments on
the flight day. A sense of total commitment is demanded from everyone
in the Team, so regularity and communication with the Team is mandatory.
The lab ambiance is inexplicable, you have to be there to feel it! We
have a lot of fun, and our learning is twice the amount of fun we have –
you do the math!!
