AeroMIT finishes fourth in US contest

Manipal Institute of Technology’s AeroMIT, a team of 20 multidisciplinary undergraduates who design, fabricate and fly remote controlled aircraft, Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAVs) and research modern drone technologies, emerged fourth overall winners at a competition held at Fort Worth, Texas, US.

AeroMIT has participated in the competition every year. The team has secured several laurels this season: First place-highest payload carried; second place- highest payload fraction; third place- final flight score and fourth overall. Earlier, during the competitions at home, AeroMIT had finished 2nd and 3rd at the NIT Surathkal competition and first, second and third at NIT Calicut.

The team members are Shloke Chaudhuri, V Hariharan, Ayush Verma, Gaurav Rajput, Siddharth Shukla, Arjit Seth, Samarth Agarwal, Adithya Ramesh, Yasasvi H Kumar, Utkarsh Tripathi, Nikhil Thota, Brian D’souza, Shreesh Mohalik, Anjay Subramanian, Amartya Gupta, Lavanya Vij, Gilbert Soyus, Kaushik Chavali, Joel D'souza and Vishnu Priyatam.

“We broke into the top 10 in Season 5, top five in Season 6 and have gone one up to fourth place in Season 7 in SAE AeroDesign in the micro class division,” team leader Shloke Chaudhuri said.

He said the problem statement is based on conflicting parameters of an aircraft. It should have high payload fraction while being highly modular and small in size with the lowest empty weight possible to maximise the score. It is a test of engineering ability and production management.

Speaking about the challenges, Shloke said, “Our biggest challenge this year was the availability of resources. India as a whole has a very limited RC culture and so, a lot of the components need to be imported and this not only costs us a lot of money but also a significant amount of time. But it is a growing hobby and we hope it will smoothen things for future seasons”.