BENGALURU: For Karnataka-originated student researcher Bhargavaram Krishnapur and his team, getting shortlisted by the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) prestigious ISRO Robotics Challenge – UR Rao Satellite Centre (IRoC-U) meant creating an autonomous drone capable of traversing across Mars’ atmosphere. Despite subsequent elimination from the ongoing challenge during one of its gruelling rounds, Krishnapur and his team are still hard at work, perfecting their drone for the mammoth task it seeks to accomplish.
Led by Bengaluru-based researcher Dr. Salur Srikant Patnaik, dean at the IFIM School of Technology, the team of students at Vijaybhoomi University set out to build a drone with an Autonomous Navigation for an Aerial Vehicle (ANAV).
“Unlike Earth, Mars has no GPS infrastructure for a drone to determine its position and navigate conventionally. The IRoC-U challenge therefore required an ANAV capable of perceiving terrain, navigating, avoiding obstacles and identifying suitable landing zones without relying on external navigation aids. Our team developed a functional drone prototype incorporating Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based sensing, which uses laser pulses to measure distances, allowing the onboard system to build an understanding of surrounding terrain and obstacles,” explained Dr. Patnaik.
Despite being spearheaded by Dr. Patnaik, neither Krishnapur nor anyone else amongst the students had ever built a drone before, making the task all the more challenging. “The hardest problem was that we did not know what we did not know. We were learning how to build a drone and learning the constraints of flying on Mars at the same time. Mars has about one percent of Earth’s air density, so the instincts you build here with do not carry over. And with no GPS, you lose the one thing every ‘normal’ drone depends on,” said Krishnapur.
Starting out as one of 177 shortlisted teams from over 2,000 teams from across the country, Dr. Patnaik and Krishnapur’s team find themselves continuing to fine tune the drone, with the hopes of completion being the only incentive. “What a team like ours needs to go further is continuity. A shortlisted proposal has to become working hardware, and that needs a dedicated test space, funding spread across a full academic year instead of in bursts, and guidance from people who have built flight systems before,” Krishnapur admitted.