JOIN USA team of engineering students from PESIT have managed to get the 13th spot in an international competition designed to test Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).
Team Aeolus, which took part in the SAE Aero Design East competition held in Atlanta in April this year, stood 13th out of 65 teams and was the first among all the Asian teams.
The competition challenges the team to carry as high a payload as possible within various design constraints specified by the SAE rule book.
Akash, Ajay, Achuth, Iranna, Raghuveer, Shashank and Arvind are mechanical engineering students at PESIT and have been working on the UAV for a year now. Says Ajay, “Our UAV design helped us perform better in the competition. Even the wings were stable and tested it with two prototypes.” The project costs Rs 3.5 lakh and was sponsored by the college, while the students themselves spent on the cost of travel. The team was led by Prof S V Satish.
The plane is mostly made of balsa wood and the wing span is 2.5 metres. It weighs 4.8 kgs and can lift 7 kg payload in addition to its own weight. Team member Iranna Gouda says that it had the shortest take-off distance in the entire contest.
The team now hopes to optimise on its design and they have already sought permission from IISc for wind tunnel testing. They also hope to incorporate electronics to make it fly by itself and use GPS locating system to make it travel from one point to another.