By OUR STAFF REPORTER
DEHRADUN, 1 Mar: The first ever Drone India Festival 2019 was organised by Government of Uttarakhand through its Drone Application and Research Centre (a joint Initiative of NTRO and ITDA) with UPES as the academic partners. Led by Amit Sinha, Director of ITDA, this platform brought together industry representatives, people from Academia, Policy makers, Drone Users, Manufacturers and Service Providers, all under one roof. The festival comprised technical sessions on Drone Technology along with Drone flying competitions. A total of 970 individuals from 21 states participated in this national event including 14 speakers and subject matter experts from various organisations in India including HAL, Adani, DRONITECH, IDEA FORGE, ANSARI PRECISIONS from the Industry and professors from IIT- Bombay, IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Roorkee.
Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat inaugurated the event in the presence of Mussoorie MLA Ganesh Joshi; VM Chamola, Director of HAL; Lt Gen Girish Kumar, Surveyor General of India; RK Sudhanshu, Secretary, IT; Arun Dhand, Senior Director of UPES; Rajat Dwivedi, Base Director of NTRO; Ashok Kumar, DGP, Uttarakhand and Amit Sinha, Director, ITDA.
In all, five drone competitions were held in which a total of 94 teams comprising individuals and groups from 10 states took part, including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Chandigarh, Delhi, Telangana, West Bengal and Uttarakhand. All the competitions carried two cash prizes, each. The first prize was of Rs 1 lakh and the second, Rs 50,000. The First Prize in the “Maximum Take Off Weight Challenge” was won by Team UPES followed by Team IIT Bombay. In the “Drone Hurdle Race”, the first prize was claimed by a Dehradun based start-up called “D-TOWN” and the second went to Team UPES. The first prize in “Image Analysis competition” was taken by Team IIT Roorkee and the second place was shared by IIT Roorkee and the Team from Survey of India. The competition on carrying Liquid medicine was called ”Dhanvantri” and the winners were Team UPES followed by Team Droni-Tech from Mumbai; the first prize in “Flying Eyes”, a competition on classifying drone captured images was claimed by Team IIT-Roorkee and the second prize was claimed by Team Rudraparyag.
Dehradun Mayor Sunil Uniyal ‘Gama’ presented the prizes at the valedictory ceremony.
The organising team comprised Dr Sudhir Joshi, Dr Vijay Patidar, Dr Amit Mondal and Vinay Chaudhary from UPES along with 35 students from Department of Aerospace in UPES in collaboration with Anil Tadkod, Rajni Joshi, Preeti Tyagi, Mukesh Bisht, Vikas Gupta, Maj DS Sidhu, Alok Tomar and Mr Harish Narula from ITDA and its associates.
