City boys beat the best in US

Students from Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) have brought home laurels in shape of a prestigious win against top-notch foreign universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell.

tudents from Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) have brought home laurels in shape of a prestigious win against top-notch foreign universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell.

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Flying high on its achievement, a team of 10 undergraduate students of DCE has recently won the directors award at the International Unmanned Aircraft Systems Competition 2009 held in the US between June 17 and 22.

The seven-year-old competition — organised by Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) in association with US Navy — is an international platform, which saw the participation of 18 universities this year.

The DCE team, which was the only Indian team at the competition, was awarded 1,500 US dollars.

“We were up against some of the best American universities. While their teams had post graduate students and research scholars, we were just undergraduate students,” said Rochak Chadha, a team member and second year student of Electronics and Communications Engineering.

An unmanned aircraft —which can fly without being physically manned by a human pilot — is usually used for defense applications where human lives cannot be risked. They can serve purpose of surveillance of sensitive areas and destroying targets.

The aircraft designed by DCE students, which cost about Rs 10 lakh, weighs seven kilos and has a wing-span of about 10 feet.

“Our vehicle clearly had an edge over others as we had designed our own auto-pilot system. The other teams had used commercially available auto pilot system.”

“The idea of this unmanned aircraft came from our director's dream to develop UAVs to watch Delhi during the Commonwealth Games,” said R.K. Sinha, Dean, Industrial Research and Innovations, DCE.