Hindustan University students win Sheepherder award

A team of eight students from aerospace and avionics department built a lightest drone of 600 grams with the configuration including batteries kill switch and collision avoidance system. The drone flew for the longest time and hovered for 12 minutes.

According to C. Ashish, who headed the project, it was an aerial robot, generally called a quad copter. It has four motors and two propellers. The working is similar to that of helicopter. The competition is all about navigating 10 round of robots from one point to the other.

“We had chosen a quad copter as an aerial robot, which has an on board computer. It has two cameras, one positioned at the front of the copter and the other at the bottom of the copter. Normally the use of the camera is directed to its robot. It has got the target identification process using two cameras so that it can navigate accordingly,” he said.

Kunal Naik his teammate said they used a new technique in this robot, which is optical flow navigation. It is a different concept without the use of GPS. He said, “It is a vision-based navigation. Whatever the camera captures it moves accordingly. The flight time was about 12 minutes.”

For the transmission of commands Wifi laptops have been used. The laptops were pre-programmed and the laptops were called as drone control stations. All the commands were transmitted and received from the drone to the computer.

There were many hurdles and had to place ultra sonic sensors to avoid collisions. So that it moves without hindrance. “We have been working for one and half year. We spent around Rs 4-5 lakh and with R & D it would cost around Rs 10 lakh,” he said.