Jatayu

Team Jatayu is another club involved in making UAVs in our campus.  The Autonomous Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) a programmable vehicle with an auto-pilot built by Project Jatayu team from RV College of Engineering has won the third place at the Australian Outback Search and Rescue Challenge in 2009. They got a cash prize of Australian $1000. The first and second places were won by Melbourne UAV and Southern Queensland University teams respectively.

With this, the five-member team of Udayan U, Priyadarshi Harsha, Vinay R, Shiva Prasad and Vikas R Wadhvani studying in fourth year Electronics and Communication in our college became the first Indian team to win at the event held on Sept 29 and 30, 2009 at the Kingaroy airport in Queensland. A total of 25 teams from countries including Israel, Netherlands, and Iran took part.

It was a challenge for the team to even get selected. On the first day, all teams had to demonstrate safety precautions, just in case their aircraft crashed in a civilian area. After this, only eight teams were shortlisted to take part in the actual event. Although their plane was relatively small, Vikas admits, they were lucky to have landed in the right spot in spite of the day being windy. Aircraft of other teams crashed and went up in flames.

BUILDING THE AIRCRAFT

Initially, the team started with the concept of a vertical take-off. Since all teams were following this concept, they switched to using fixed wings. They then used heat sensors called thermopiles that test the tilt of the aircraft, and send a signal to the Paparazzi Auto-pilot, that stabilizes the plane. The navigation was controlled using the Global Positioning System (GPS). A camera with an IR filter was fitted on to it to identify the wavelength of heat source next to Joe.

To visit the official Team Jatayu blog , click here