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Towards design and make in India fixed-wing UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have moved from the phase of ‘on paper’ applications to real-world applications.

In the early days of computers, people bought computers to use specific programs that came installed with the computer. Such software were called killer apps. Computers got sold for want of the killer apps.

UAVs are currently in that phase. UAV companies are selling their vehicles by advertising the specific application that their UAV is best at performing: for DJI, the killer app is drone photography; for Skydio, it is inspection, mapping, and survey; for Yamaha, it is precision agriculture; for many other companies, it is package delivery.

One of the recent applications of UAVs is in weather monitoring. In a previous post, I mentioned that one of the thrust areas of the Geophysical Flows Lab is using UAVs for field measurements. UAVs can acquire data with temporal and spatial resolutions that are missing in the data obtained using the current measurement systems.

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Multirotors as microgravity platforms

If there is a fire breakout in the International Space Station (ISS), will the fire propagate as if on Earth?

There are these fantastic experiments done onboard ISS that reveal how physical phenomena behave differently under microgravity conditions. To study how physical and biological processes behave in microgravity conditions, we need to create microgravity. ISS naturally has microgravity, but access to ISS as an experimental platform is limited and expensive. A facility that allows us to simulate microgravity on Earth is a drop-tower — a tall tower from which the experimental set-up can be ‘dropped’ and the set-up experiences microgravity during the resultant free-fall. Building these tall drop-towers takes time and is costly.

Siddhardha, as part of his PhD thesis, proposed that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. Thus, now we have a portable, cheap, and versatile microgravity platform.

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