Manipal’s very own team of aeronautical wizards, after leaving behind a trail of wonderstruck flight enthusiasts and commonplace stargazers alike at the technical fest of IIT Bombay in January, recently travelled all the way to Lakeland, Florida to participate in the SAE AeroDesign East competition. They’ve officially become Asia Pacific’s 2nd best, and the 10th best Aeronautical/ Aerospace team in the world. Talk about taking our University’s banner to greater heights. Quite literally, at that!
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down and having a word with the great minds who achieved this symphony of monumental feats, and to try and pick their brains about their approach to doing what they do best, and learn a thing or two about AeroMIT in general.
Rahul: Tell me a bit about AeroMIT. When was this team founded, and what was its primary objective?
AeroMIT was founded around 5 years ago by four Mechanical Engineering students who happened to share a passion for aeronautics. They decided to start a team with the primary objective of participating in the SAE AeroDesign competition. There were other teams dedicated to Automobiles (Formula Manipal) and Robotics (RoboManipal) but there wasn’t one for aeronautics. So they decided to change that.
Rahul: You guys just came back from the AeroDesign East competition in Florida. How was the trip? What was the event like?
The trip was fantastic. SAE AeroDesign was, as always, extremely well organized and it was amazing to be a part of something as big as this. We were very happy that our planes performed flawlessly, which earned us…well, whatever we won in the competition.
Rahul: What does it feel like to be the 10th best aeronautics team in the world?
Well, we’d prefer to be known for being 2nd in the Asia pacific region. It just sounds cooler (laughs). We could’ve done better in the competition, but we’re quite pleased with what we achieved. But we’re more proud of our Design Report score, in which we scored fourth best in the world.
Rahul: Kudos! What was the judging criteria?
There were three rounds. The first was Design Report, second was Oral Presentation in which we had to present our design and try to sell the plane as well; and the third was the Flight round in which we had to actually fly the plane and make it land within the landing zone. The more smooth and accurate your plane’s landing and overall flying is, the more point you’d get.
Rahul: Which team won the overall competition and what was their plane design like?
The team from Georgia Tech. won the competition. Their aeronautical department is one of the best 3 in the world, and they’d actually come up with a kite! So, instead of actually having fixed wings, the whole body is designed to generate lift. One of the criteria for grading the designs was the weight of the plane and theirs was incredibly light. The entire weight of their plane was somewhere around 20 grams!
Another judging criteria was the Payload Fraction which is given by the formula:
(Payload)/{(Payload)+(Weight of the empty plane),
Which was quite high in their case. We asked them a few other things about the specifics of their design, but they were reluctant to reveal those, because, well, that was a winning design and they knew it. (laughs)
Rahul: You guys also went to IIT Bombay for their TechFest and bagged the 1st rank in the Design and the 2nd rank in Flying Skills categories. How did their fest compare to SAE AeroDesign?
It didn’t. Not even close! The IIT Bombay competition was organized so poorly that we actually ended up doing most of the organization ourselves. We had to set up the field before the competition started. SAE is a very professional competition and we were flying our model planes on actual runways, whereas here, we had to fly them in the college’s football field.
There was some competition from the other teams who participated at the event at IIT Bombay, but we’ve been flying for a quite a while now and when we saw the other teams fly, we had a feeling we’d end up as at least the first three teams. We were the only team to manage a spot landing.
The flying competition, however, was somewhat more challenging. The aim of that competition was only to test a pilot’s flying skills. So you could buy a plane and fly it as well. Also, it was restricted to only Universities. Anyone could participate in it. I wouldn’t say Aero-Modelling is a very popular hobby, but quite a number of enthusiasts partake in it, so we had about 56 competitors for the flying competition. We finished second among them.
Rahul: Amazing! At IIT-B was there any other team that provided tough competition?
Not really (laughs). But the teams from IIT Kanpur and IIT- BHU were quite impressive in their performance and design. I think they stood 2nd and 3rd respectively.
Rahul: Through all of this, how much support did you get from the University in terms of funding or technical assistance?
Technical assistance, not really. But most of the parts that make up the aero plane design is funded by either the University or the sponsors. The University has this rule which says that all travel expenses are to be covered by us alone, so they don’t aid in that; but our recruitment and other various monetary needs are covered by the University and the sponsors.
Rahul: You mentioned that AeroMIT was founded by the students with the help of a few members of the faculty; do the faculty still have an active role in the functioning of AeroMIT with regard to any kind of assistance?
They did initially, because the team back then had very little experience. But as the years progressed, the role of the faculty advisors started getting lesser. Of course, we’ll go to them once in a while, but now we’re at a position to judge the quality of our designs by ourselves and trust our own judgment.
They do help us a little with the Aerodynamics theory, but RC isn’t something they know very well, so we’ve kind of learned to manage it all independently.
Rahul: You guys have an initiative called the Advanced Drone Research. Could you tell me more about that?
Advanced Drone Research is an initiative by AeroMIT to expand our horizons into the world of autonomous flight navigation and other such areas. What we wanted to do was increase our exposure to multi-copters and multi-rotors. We recently made a quad-copter take off from MIT’s football field, go to KC and come back to its original takeoff region. What we did was, flick a switch, and have the quad-copter do all of this by itself.
What we plan to do is long range autonomous flights using aircrafts. Multirotors need a lot of batteries so we plan to use an aircraft to extend the length of the autonomous flight. So, we’re currently trying out these new aircraft models for those purposes.
We’re also doing a lot of First Person View flights, in which we’ve affixed a camera in the cockpit of the model airplane, which lets you virtually be in the cockpit. We used footage from a few of those flights and complied them into a video which shows an aerial view of a large number of places in Manipal.
Rahul: Yes! I remember seeing that video. It was all kinds of epic. You guys recently just finished your first year recruitments for the new AeroMIT team. What do you think of the new recruits and what do you expect of them?
We think we have a fantastic team of first years! The season of 2015 has been the best one for AeroMIT so far. People actually know what AeroMIT is now. A number of us didn’t know about AeroMIT before we joined, but that’s going to change a lot this year onwards. Three People (E.V.Subramanian, Arunabha and Maahin) with a combined aero modelling experience of about 20 years had been training the new team before this, and that training will get passed on to the new recruits.
Some of the first years have already been making RC planes which is really impressive, so we do indeed have a really promising batch of first years. Surprisingly, very few people from the Aeronautics department qualified to be a part of our team. A lot our first years now belong instead to Mechanical, E&C, EEE and even Biomedical.
We’ve come this far and with the fantastic new team and all of our combined experience, there’s no looking back now!
Rahul: I’m absolutely sure of that! Thank you all for your time and godspeed for your future endeavours!
The AeroMIT Team (2014) is:
E.V. Suramanian – Team Leader
Arunabha Bhattacharya – Electronics Head
Maahin Beri – Structures Head
Anuj Arora – Aerodynamics Head
Akshat Singh – Management Head
Atul Choudhary – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Sahil Verman – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Snehil Raghav – Structures Subsystem
Naina Vinod – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Cairen Miranda – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Saahil Batra – Management Subsystem
Dheer Verma – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Aniruddha Poddar – Structures Subsystem
Anshul Sharma – Structures Subsystem
Sandeep George Nereyeth – Electronics Subsystem
Achyuth Vishwamithra – Electronics Subsystem
Twinkle Kothari – Aerodynamics Subsystem
Dhruva Shesh Kemp – Management Subsystem
Members who went to SAE Aerodesign East, Florida –
E.V.Subramanian – Team Leader
Arunabha Bhattacharya – Electronics Head
Maahin Beri – Structures Head
Anuj Arora – Aerodynamics Head
Akshat Singh – Management Head
Aniruddha Poddar
Anshul Sharma
Snehil Raghav
Naina Pisharoti
Atul Choudhary
Saahil Batra
Members who went to IIT-B –
E.V.Subramanian – Team Leader
Arunabha Bhattacharya – Electronics Head
Maahin Beri – Structures Head
Aniruddha Poddar
Anshul Sharma
Sandeep George Nereyeth
Dheer Verma
Snehil Raghav
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