A National level competition on Design and Flying UAVs -Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under the banner 'FLYTRON' was concluded today in a glittering ceremony with prizes of Rs 2,00,000/- to the winning teams. Dr A K Singh, Director INMAS, DRDO Delhi was the Chief Guest and Air Marshal (Retd) Sukhchain Singh AVSM VSM was the Guest of Honor and headed a panel of judges to check the performance of the various teams. Team PEC was the winner of Flytron, whereas team of UPES Dehradun and DTU Delhi were the runner-ups for the event. Dr AK Singh in his valedictory address urged the students to come forward and stated that there is no dearth of opportunities in aerospace and aviation. He further stated that Flytron will be an annual event with more participation and increasing the autonomy of the systems. He stressed on theme based competitions like MAVs, Quadcopters, UAVs etc. Air Marshal Sukhchain Singh in his in his address stated that it is an era of multi-disciplinary projects and the aerospace market is open to all kind of engineers with the passion to work.
Dr. Rakesh Kumar, Head of Aerospace Engineering Department and coordinator of the event highlighted the utilities of intelligent unmanned aerial systems in diverse fields and emphasized on the need of research on Unmanned Aerial Systems aimed at improving endurance, range, fuel efficiency and autonomous operations. Er Jimmy Kansal, Hony Secretary, Aeronautical Society of India highligted that the event is in line with the Government's 'Make in India' initiative and to boost innovation in this upcoming field of UAVs. He further stated the future of the nation in terms of technological advancements in UAVs should be in the safe hands of future technologists and scientists. He urged the students to think "Out of the Box', while designing UAVs.
FlyTron was organised by Aeronautical Society of India, Chandigarh Branch in association with PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh and Aeronautical Research and Development Board, New Delhi. The competition had two independent events. Nine teams from various institutions participated in each of the events i.e. UAV competition and poster presentation.
In first event, the participants were required to compete in teams by designing, fabricating and flying autonomous UAV wherein the UAV was required to perform certain predefined tasks. What made the event more interesting and challenging was, that some tasks were to be performed autonomously, i.e. UAV was not under any active controls. In second event, the participants came up with innovative conceptual designs on UAV in the form of Poster presentations, which were judged by Prof Rajkumar Pant of IIT Bombay.
Earlier, the Chief Guest, Padma Shri Dr. Satish Kumar inaugurated the event on 25.2.2017 in the presence of Prof. Manoj K. Arora, Director PEC.