A Final-year Student Designs An Army Drone On His Own, Get MOD's Attention

The well-known programme ‘Make In India’ is having highly positive effect to the young people. Recently, an UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) has been developed at a college in Punjab. The developer was none other than an engineering student who is only 20 years old. The device has successfully drawn the Indian Air Force team’s attention.

According to the information reported by the Indian Express, The developer’s name is Ankit Singh. He is currently in his final year in his college, which is B.Tech college in Mechanical Engineering at Chandigarh Group of Colleges, Mohali. Having the Defence Investor cell assist him, Ankit were finally able to submit his proposal.

The bad news is we still don’t know much about how the device would look like. Its design is still remained unpublished. Singh handed the UAV in to ‘Make In India’ programme, particularly under the category: Make-II. Currently, there is no sign of the government fund being provided to develop the first designs under this very category of the project.

Living in Himachal Pradesh state, particularly Bilaspur district, Singh is having a lot of help from a group of teachers as well as multidisciplinary students. At first, he couldn’t draw any attention towards or make people know about the intrinsic details. Then, when the Ministry Of Defence started to notice his project, he got extremely happy.

It was the scanty study about the sector of UAVs that motivated Ankit, who had been developing the basics ideas about making an UAV since the very first days of college. Ankit made a lot of effort in designing the device. He thoroughly designed the UAV to the smallest detail of the vehicle. That results from the component being designed and developed specifically as an Indian mid-range vehicle that is capable of both serving for supervising purpose and being a weapon.

According to Ankit, his device got many positive reviews from the DRDO, along with that is the adjustments suggested by the Army to make it even better. Ankit said: 

Amresh Kumar, professor’s aide at the college was the mentor of the projects made by students. As Ankit has made a fully detail research on it, the leaders of his college thought that it was best to pay more attention to the development.

Being a student at a private college, at the moment Ankit is using his fund to manage the research process, unlike others from IIT institutions who receive financial support. However, he confirmed that the defence officials have given him and his team some advice relating to AI component of the vehicle as well as the combination between his UAV and the Army’s (or IAF’s) inter-communication network.

The next goal of the team is to develop a new flying design in the next three months.