For the uninitiated, Netra is a man-portable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which can be used for a variety of applications like surveillance, reconnaissance and aerial imagery. It has been designed and created by a team of five engineers, Ankit Mehta, Ashish Bhat, Rahul Singh, Amardeep Singh and Vipul Joshi, in collaboration with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Netra is currently being deployed for applications such as counter-insurgency, anti-terror operations, border management, crowd monitoring, disaster management (the armed forces are currently using the UAV to assist with search and rescue operations in Uttarakhand), aerial imagery, and the like.
Netra is a lightweight UAV, made of carbon-fibre composites. It uses four rotors to provide lift and control, giving it VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities. The absence of moving parts, apart from the rotors, motors and transmissions, makes Netra a very-low-maintenance device. Added to that, its low weight of 1.5 kg (in large part, due to its carbon-fibre construction) makes the vehicle easily portable.
When asked how they got the idea of this vehicle, Ankit Mehta, co-founder and CEO of IdeaForge, explains, “You will notice that the UAV employs a quad-rotor configuration. Initially, it was this configuration that gripped our imagination when we were still students at IIT Bombay. We were trying to find a way to make aerial platforms that could be easier to fly and make, even for a student. We independently worked out this configuration without any prior art reference and were genuinely excited about the configuration’s intrinsic capabilities to be a stable hovering system. Its mechanical simplicity made it look doable. Once we started our company, the demand for UAV avionics and systems really got us in the groove. We created this product to act as a last-mile surveillance and reconnaissance tool for the forces.”
How it works
The Netra UAV is a VTOL quad-rotor configuration, which is stabilised by
the BlueFire autopilot developed by IdeaForge indigenously. A
completely autonomous system that requires no prior flying experience
for an operator, it is controlled through a ground control software
application, which has an intuitive graphical user interface. The
operator only needs to point and click on the satellite map displayed in
the software application, to navigate the UAV. Netra keeps sending live
video footage to the ground control station, which helps the operators
to plan their moves based on the aerial video data received...
More -
https://www.electronicsforu.com/electronics-startups/innovations-innovators/man-portable-unmanned-aerial-vehicle
