Arun is a third year undergraduate student of Civil
Engineering. He plays the guitar and is a part of the
NITK Music Club.
His hobby was renewed in 2007, which also happens to be the
year he joined as a faculty member at NITK Surathkal. Three students - Hari Shankar, Neil and Srinivas - approached him, requesting to work on building and flying RC planes under his guidance.
At this point of time, he was working on flow visualization. He
agreed to take them under his guidance and they started working
on flying RC planes.
They bought the first plane, a ready made one available in the
market. A team from Gujarat, including an NITK alumnus, trained
Srinivas and he learnt how to control and fly the RC plane with
sufficient amount of flight simulation training. The first competition they participated in was organized by DRDO – The Golden
Jubilee Students Competition. They had to construct a deployable
low cost outdoor system for this competition. They went on to win
the competition and received an award of Rs. 50,000.
After their first success, Dr. Sandeep Sancheti, former Director at NITK, granted Dr. Pruthviraj a funding of Rs. 3,00,000 to
further his work in what had just started out as a hobby. He took up
a new batch, a group of 11 students. They went on to build India’s
smallest autonomous aerial vehicle which flew on its own once the
GPS co-ordinates of its flight path were fed in. A third batch of
students went on to win the Innovate India competition by NDRC
for which they had to construct a Low Cost Aerial Vehicle with
an Enhanced Communication System. It was a huge competition,
consisting of 280 participating teams from all over India, out of
which only 50 teams were selected for the final round.
Following this highly successful stint, he published a bunch of
papers, one of his favourite being “The Application of Low Cost
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle as a Monitoring Unit” in ARMS 2010.
He has moved on to flying RC planes using Open Source technology and is currently working on a DRDO AR & DB project on
the Simulation and Development of a Flapping Mechanism with
a funding of Rs. 17.803 lakhs. He also assisted Professor Gangadharan in the construction and development of the Virtual Lab in
the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Pruthviraj Umesh is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Applied Mechanics and Hydraulics.
His interests include the application of remote
controlled aircraft in wildlife conservation and
agriculture. He is also working on thermal imaging as
well as 3D printing.
He has recently taken up an interest in Aerial Photography.
He was inspired to follow this hobby when he happened to see
someone using a kite to take pictures. Professor Pruthviraj added
a stabilization system to kites that he bought from Team Mangalore, a kite making organization that holds a record in the Limca
Book of Records for the largest kite ever built. He then moved
on to using this technology to assist in forest conservation and
awareness on being requested to take aerial photos by the Forest Department at the BRT Temple Tiger Reserve and also at
the jungle lodges in Karwar and Derbagh with the assistance of
Mr. Vijay Mohan Raj, a famous animal and forest conservation
activist.
He was also requested by the Archaeological Department under the Government of India to take aerial photos of Bekal Fort,
Sringeri Temple and other archaeological sites. They have currently requested him to take aerial photos of all the archaeological sites present in Karnataka to spread awareness. It has become
a growing passion for him, and one he pursues in all enthusiasm
in his spare time. In his words – “I may spend the entire day flying
my plane and taking aerial pictures of one site. 99% of them may
be average. But one good aerial picture can fetch you a payment
of Rs. 1.5 lakhs, which shows you how difficult it is to click such
pictures that capture the essence of these sites.”
Professor Pruthviraj has currently started using these planes
for Thermal and Multispectral Imaging, used by the Agriculture
and Forest Department of India to identify diseased plants. For
this, heavy load octocopters (8 motors) with a payload of 5kg,
hexacopters with a payload of 1.5 kg, quadcopters with a payload
of less than 1kg and fixed wing planes for a payload of less than
1 kg are used. Kites and Helium balloons are also used as alternatives in this process of aerial photography. He has also developed
an interest in Disaster Management, on being inspired by Professor Srihari from the Civil Engineering Department.
Despite all his laurels and achievements, his favourite moments are with his father, who helps him build every single plane
from scratch and has attended every single flying competition
with him
.
The Shoreline
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