The Government of India is conducting various programs to facilitate the development of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), considering the vast amount of applications of the UAS technology. MeitY has approved a project on Capacity building for human resource development in Unmanned Aircraft System (Drone and related Technology) for a period of 5 years starting from September of 2023. The project’s overall budget is Rs. 89.87 crores, distributed across 5 Resource Centres (RCs)  and 25 participating institutes (PIs). IIIT Hyderabad is one of the RCs along with IISc Bangalore, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, and IIT Kanpur. The focus of IIIT Hyderabad is to provide training to 5 PIs, that includes IIT Goa, IIT Jammu, NIT Silchar, CDAC-Pune, and NIELIT-Calicut on the topic Allied UAS Technologies. The training consists of a one week Master Trainer Program twice a year. The PIs will subsequently train many students based on the syllabus covered in the Master Trainer Program. Other significant activities include workshops, research publications, NPTEL course preparation, IP generation, etc., related to Allied UAS Technologies. The four Robotic Research Center (RRC) faculty will jointly supervise the project. As a part of this project, a laboratory for UAS will be established in IIIT Hyderabad using the lab establishment funds received from MeitY.

The first Master Trainer Program (MTP) was conducted from 30 January 2023 to 3 February 2023. The topics covered were Introduction to UAV, Kinematics and Dynamics, Cyber Security for Internet of drones, IoT, RTOS for drones, Control System, Image processing, Arducopter, ROS, AIRSIM, OpenCV, and DGCA regulations for drones. The program concluded with a flight demonstration from Arka Aerospace. There were nearly 30 participants for the MTP- Batch 1.

March 2023