Report on GIAN Course on Fixed Wing UAVs (Drones) at IIT Bhubaneswar

A GIAN course on Design & Applications of Fixed Wing UAVs (Drones) was conducted by Dr. Sathyanarayana A and Dr. Yogesh G. Bhumkar in IIT Bhubaneswar from 12th - 23rd December 2016. The course was taught by Prof. Sumon K. Sinha, SINHATECH, Retired Professor, University of Mississippi, USA. Prof. Simha was assisted by Mr. Sumontro Sinha, a licensed FAA Drone pilot. The course had over 37 participants including students & professionals from IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, VSSC - ISRO Trivandrum and other colleges and institutions across the nation. While the course had lecture material related to the design of drones including fundamentals of aerodynamics, flight control, stability, aircraft structures, avionics and other related material the design of drones, an important and exhaustive part of the course was hands on training on flying the drones and designing & building them. As an outcome of the course over 9 drones were built from both prefabricated kits as well as from the scratch. Drones were built for applications like reconnaissance & aerial photography, delivery of critical supplies (water, medicines etc), instrumented platform for weather data collection, drone pilot training among others. The students also interacted with the Honorable Director, Prof. V . Raja Kumar who encouraged all the students to continue this new found enthusiasm to design drones for defence, agriculture and other requirements of the country, incubate the ideas & participate in setting up start-ups at the Institute. The Director also suggested that an Aero Club be setup in the Institute for facilitating these activities of drone development.

Video of Instrumented Drone Platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi3IU8c8zEE

Director & Prof. Sinha interacting with the students of GIAN course