Aero India to host Drone Olympics

Hyderabad: Artificial Intelligence is one of the disrupting technologies that is going to impact efficiency, productivity, speed and innovation in the emerging industries. Aerospace 4.0 is going to encompass all the features of AI in the next 15 years to cut down cost and cycle time of design, optimisation, simulation, prototyping, manufacturing, supply chain, maintenance and product updates, said eminent scientist Dr VK Saraswat.
 
Dr Saraswat was speaking at the national conference on ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Opportunities and Challenges’ held at IICT’ here on Sunday. Dr G Satheesh Reddy, Secretary, Department of Defence, R&D, chairman DRDO and present chairman of Aeronautical Society of India, said, “There is a tremendous transformation taking place in the areas of unmanned systems and associated technologies. Unmanned vehicles are going to play a major role in both defence and civilian sectors.

There is an urgent need for the industries to gear up and work in these areas.”He also said that, “Indigenous development of sensors will play a major role and will revolutionise applications like UAVs for commercial and defence applications and will greatly impact our daily lives in future.” He highlighted the contributions of DRDO in design and development of state-of-the-art UAVs and informed that a contest “Drone Olympics” is being organised by Ministry of Defence during the forthcoming Aero India event.

Dr VV Rao, Programme Director, Agni, and chairman of organising committee, said, “Aerospace sensor technologies will play a vital role in futuristic unmanned systems. The scenario is changing fast with emergence of nano technologies and miniaturised embedded systems. Unmanned Systems will revolutionise agriculture, medical, space, defence and environment management. He also gave an overview of the memorial lectures.

Dr RK Tyagi, president AeSI, briefed the gathering on the history of AeSI and its achievements. He gave details of various AeSI branch activities in the last one year, including major launches. He informed that the government had formed UAV policy last year, which would be implemented in 2019.

About 500 eminent scientists, engineers, industrialists andprofessionals from the aerospace sector attended the conference. Dr AS Kiran Kumar, former Chairman, ISRO, Dr RK Tyagi, president, Aeronautical Society of India, and others were present.