One corner of the Centre for Innovation (CFI) hall at IIT-Madras was exceptionally crowded on Sunday morning as a team from the aero club started demonstrating their multi-rotor copter.
Soon after, many of those present pulled out their mobile phones to take photos of the device as it rose in the air, turned around and landed again.
What is different about this multi-rotor copter, built by the club, is that it can lift loads of up to 3 kg, and remain stable using the controller board that the team has installed. The team is now working to introduce wave point navigation in the multi-rotor.
“We can connect the multi-rotor to a laptop and program it to travel from point A to point B, and also incorporate obstacle avoidance,” Dheepak N. Khatri, head of the club, said.
This was one of the many projects on display at the open house of CFI on Sunday. A student-run centre, CFI encourages the campus community to come up with ideas that the centre then helps them work on in order to make them reality.
Among the other projects on display was an omni-directional robot, which can change direction without changing orientation; an autonomous underwater vehicle; an autonomous surface boat; a virtual orchestra and even a device to segregate and compress household waste.
“There are nine clubs that are part of CFI, with around 300 people working on projects with us. The CFI encourages socially and industrially relevant projects that could, at a later date, be converted into an entrepreneurial venture,” Aayush Maloo, student manager of CFI, said.
While most of the teams that work with CFI are from IIT-M, students from other colleges are also welcome to pitch projects, he said, adding that the purpose behind the centre was to encourage students to come in with an idea and leave with a product.
