BITS Hyderabad Students Take Defence Tech From Campus to Field
Its aim is to give machines greater ability to navigate, communicate and operate with limited human intervention.
Hyderabad: A student engineering project at BITS-Pilani’s Hyderabad campus has moved from a robotics competition to field trials with the Indian Army, with its founders developing autonomous systems for drones, artillery and battlefield communications.
Founded by undergraduate students Naman Kasliwal and Shiv Patil, Beijan Tech operates from the campus-based CORAS Lab and was developing what it described as an “intelligence layer” for conventional defence equipment. Its aim is to give machines greater ability to navigate, communicate and operate with limited human intervention.
The journey began with the robotics challenge of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), where the students developed a low-cost visual navigation system that reached the final. The technology drew the attention of defence officials and was deployed at the Pokhran field firing range (PFFR) for work with the Army Design Bureau on a ground station for drone swarms.
One of the start-up’s key systems was the Beijan Autonomous Navigation Module (BANM), a compact computing module that “allows drones to navigate using onboard cameras and other sensors instead of depending entirely on GPS. This matters in areas where satellite navigation may be unavailable or deliberately disrupted by jamming,” Kasliwal told Deccan Chronicle.
Beijan said BANM was being piloted at locations including the Pokhran range, Secunderabad and Leh, and had received letters of intent from eight military units. The company has reported a field deployment near Jaisalmer where it validated GPS-denied navigation and autonomous detection capabilities.
“The autonomous artillery positioning system (AAPS) is meant for older field guns, combining computer vision, positioning and motorised actuation to automate gun positioning and reduce the time needed to shift between targets,” Patil said.
The start-up is also developing secure mesh networking so battlefield assets can communicate without relying entirely on vulnerable conventional communication infrastructure. Its Prachand swarm ground station software, it says, has been deployed with formations under the Army’s Southern Command, with other applications developed for Army Air Defence.
Beijan said it has secured a ₹20 lakh MVP order for an artillery automation system and a ₹25 lakh grant through ‘Curiosity’ to accelerate research, product development and field deployment. The founders’ approach was to retrofit existing equipment rather than replace entire fleets. Beijan described its vision as “giving every machine a brain”, using AI, robotics, embedded computing and autonomous navigation to make existing defence platforms more capable.
Kasliwal, who heads ATMOS at BITS-Pilani Hyderabad, and has two patents, brings experience in robotics, while Patil has worked on large-scale digital platforms. The start-up’s development illustrates how university projects can move into specialised defence applications when prototypes are tested in operational environments.
