IIT-Guwahati set to unveil 3 new smart drones

GUWAHATI: The Aeromodelling Club of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G) has revealed on New Year that they have reached an advanced stage of manufacturing smart drones, which would be rolled out soon.
With an easy interface for the common people, the club, run by faculty members and students, has developed a ‘warehouse drone’ for warehouse management, ‘reaper drones’ for the military and law enforcement and ‘ornithopter’ based on the design of birds for surveillance in tight spaces. ‘RAVEN,’ an indigenously developed VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) capable fixed-winged aircraft, developed by the club, will be out soon, IIT-G officials said.
“The unmanned aerial vehicles are in an advanced stage. We are targeting to unveil at least three this year. The Reaper is almost ready,” Chivukula Vasudeva Sastri, professor, department of chemistry, who was instrumental in giving shape to the club, told TOI on Tuesday.
He informed that calibration testing is currently on for Reaper, while ‘RAVEN’ should be out anytime soon. On the other hand, the ‘Ornithopter’ is a futuristic idea, he added. The warehouse drone is a standard one and the idea behind is to programme a commercially available drone to make the best use of it according to the need.
IIT-G in a release said the Reaper has a wingspan of 1.8m and weighs around 3kgs with a payload of 1-1.5kgs for additional sensors.
“The Reaper comes with a modular design to facilitate transport and can be easily deployed by a single person. It has a range of 15-20 km and an average speed of 60-70 km/h,” the press release added. The Reaper drone can also be handy during natural disasters like floods or earthquakes and lend a helping hand to disaster management teams searching for the injured and trapped. Besides, the Reaper can collect data on animals in any national park, wildlife sanctuary and study their behavior.
Ornithopters flap their wings to generate forward thrust. “An ornithopter prototype is one that mimics the flapping motion of a bird flight,” an IIT-G spokesperson said.
Various wings of insects and birds were evaluated to understand how these natural flyers with flapping wings are able to produce sufficient lift to fly, he added.