The institution is closed for the day, but the design and development centre of unmanned aerial vehicles at MIT is droning with activity. I am invited into the conference room where Dr. S. Thamarai Selvi, Director, Centre for Technology Development & Transfer, Anna University, Chennai, is talking to the Dhaksha team. Their immediate concern is to send the tech-team to Thiruvannamalai to help operate their crowd-monitoring drone during the deepam festival. Their tech van is about to leave.
Team Dhaksha is special. Mentored by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam since 2002, it is part of Centre for Aerospace Research, Madras Institute of Technology (MIT), campus of Anna University, Tamil Nadu.
“A course named Aviation Electronics was launched by Dr. Kalam under the Department of Science & Technology,” said Dr. K Senthilkumar, Director-CASR. “We were procuring weapons and we needed skilled manpower to deploy them. Initially, DRDO came to MIT to train students to understand imported weapons. Anna University admitted both GATE and non-GATE students in the course.” Now team Dhaksha designs and develops unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and true to all initiatives Dr. Kalam touched, creates innovative UAV technologies for various social applications.
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The Dhaksha UAV project was launched with a R 20-crore grant from the Tamil Nadu government under TN Innovation Initiative Scheme, said Director Thamarai Selvi. Other government agencies like DRDO funded the photogramatic mapping. Since then, Dhaksha drones have reached great heights, making customised vehicles for government projects.
The DARPA award the team won in 2012 was a landmark — the Dhaksha vehicle was chosen for reliability, stability, advanced tech, and cost-effectiveness. “We competed against ten teams. We had to fly the drone over 5 km of pine trees and land it on a church roof.” They flew it in Savannah, Georgia, where, with great presence of mind, the team tweaked the machine to fly under different conditions. “It then struck us. Why wait for tech-transfer? Why not start our own research centre in India?”
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All the members were offered positions in the U.S. for UAV research, but they chose to come back. “I spent my entire student life with the Dhaksha team,” said Dr. Mohammad Rasheed, the integration expert and team member for 12 years. For him, it is a 24x7 obsession. He brings together all the systems — quality of output, UAV testing and flight, architecture. The strength of the lab is the student group, says the team. “We place them in research projects in different domains.”
Dhaksha has won contests across the globe: World record for flight-time and endurance by multi-coptor UAV for endurance (about 6 hours) under Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI); HADR Mission Task of flying 60 kms using a hybrid multi-rotor system in the UAV medical express challenge 2018 held at Dalby Model Aero Club, Queensland, Australia. And the team cherishes the APJ Abdul Kalam Award for contributions in the field of development of science/humanities/student welfare, given by the government of Tamil Nadu on Independence Day, 2018.
The centre has signed product MOUs with the police departments of Kolkata, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Kerala; Bharat Electronics Limited; Indian army; and Coal India. Drones are flown to audit mines, map agricultural activities, detect crop diseases.
“We helped with tax-planning for the Kerala government, post-disaster analysis of Gaja cyclone, and salt-pan encroachment in Tuticorin. Our data can be compared with previous data for legal scrutiny, administrative parameters, since they are better than surveillance maps.” Drone pictures are used for homeland security and defence training.
In fact, the mapping department’s work deserves a separate story, according to Leo Stalin, Project Associate-UAV mapping. “What we do is photogrammetry — photography for surveying and mapping to ascertain measurements between objects,” said Dr. Vasantharaj, Scientist-Control & Navigation Division, giving me a tour of the lab. You convert the photos the UAV sends into useful, high-resolution maps. These maps score over satellite maps because these are taken at less height, without clouds blurring the view. They are prepared in on-demand resolution. Photogrammetry helps to map places difficult to reach.
“They give accurate dimensions for road construction, revenue administration, and disaster relief. They show the terrain in 3-D.” The cadastral map was overlaid with a UAV-generated map to identify the encroachment of river beds in Cuddalore. “We have done projects to ascertain the mineral wealth of Tamil Nadu and the central government. We can replace Google maps; ours are better in resolution and accuracy.”