Three Days Skill Workshop on “ Drone Design & Aviation”

The IEEE Student Branch of Don Bosco College of Engineering, Goa, in collaboration with Eduvance and Drona Aviation organized three days hands on workshop on “Drone Design and Aviation”. The workshop was held from 7^th February to 9^th February 2020 at the Don Bosco College of Engineering campus at Fatorda, Goa. This event received participants from DBCE & PCCE Goa. Prof. Yeshudas Muttu, IEEE Branch Counselor & Prof. Flavia Leitao were the faculty coordinators for the workshop. The resource person for the workshop was Mr. Prathamesh Satardekar, Senior Systems Engineer & Mr. Ashish Yadav, Junior Systems Engineer from Eduvance, Mumbai. The main objective of this workshop was to give the student a hands-on experience of the latest technologies that are used in industry, such as Drones, AR (Augmented Reality) & VR (Virtual Reality).

Day 1: February 7, 2020

IEEE Student Member, Ms. Krystal Fernandes welcomed everyone for the three days’ workshop, & requested the speaker to take over the session.

The session began with technical and theoretical aspects of aviation. The speakers gave a presentation and spoke about the Wright brothers- who were the first ones to commercialise the plane. A timeline of the development of human flight over time was also shown. The instructors then lectured about the technical nitty-gritties of flight. Then, they spoke about the three main movements axes of flying- roll, pitch and yaw. Concepts of fluid mechanics such as Bernoulli’s Principle and the Coanda Effect were also covered.

On covering all the required details of aviation, for the second half of the day, the participants were asked to pair up in groups of two and were provided with the necessary components to assemble a drone. This included a flight control board, sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, an ESP 8266 Wi-Fi module, brushless DC motors, etc. The Eduvance drone application was given to the students that involved augmented reality technology for easy understanding of building a drone.

Day 2: February 8, 2020

The Speakers began the session by talking about the various components of a drone that included the flight control board, the sensors like an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, the electronic speed controller, etc. The materials of the various frames used for assembly, the different carbon composites were discussed.

For the next half of the day, the students were given a drone simulator using their PC and VR so that they get used to controlling the drone, move the drone while in flight, get it to rotate and keep it levitating in air. The students were taken to an open area of the campus and begin the actual aviation session of the drone, after which the students had got a hold over controlling the drone and the session was concluded for the day.

Day 3: February 9, 2020

The Final day of the Drone Design and Aviation workshop commenced with videos related to aviation, the history and timeline of aviation so as to show the relevance of programming in drones to the students. Models such as modelling of objects to be carried by drones, the mathematical model for drones and mathematical models to change applied force on drones were discussed.

The instructors of the workshop laid the importance of programming a drone and the various applications of drones with different kinds of programming algorithms. They also spoke about the software- Integrated Development Environment (IDE)- and how the programming works and proceeds in the system. The students also learnt methods to program any hardware such as In System Programming (ISP), USB port programming and wireless programming. The IDE that was used by them was called Cygnus IDE.

Examples of several Application Programming Interface (API) were stated and the choice of choosing an API to use and test the behaviour of the drone was given to the participants. Towards the end of the session, the instructors provided them plenty of time to test the experimental programs and APIs, and also to fly the drones.

The last session of the three days hands on workshop was wrapped up by taking the feedback of the participants. They were later asked to dissemble the drones that they built and worked on for the past days. All the attendees will be provided with participation certificates by Eduvance. Vote of thanks was given by IEEE Student Chair, Mr. Renvick Fernandes. As a token of appreciation, Mementos were handed over to Mr. Prathamesh Satardekar & Mr. Ashish Yadav from Team Eduvance by IEEE Branch Counselor, Prof. Yeshudas Muttu. The entire workshop received motivation from Director, Rev. Fr. Kinley D’Cruz, Principal Dr. Neena Panandikar & Head of ETC Department, Dr. Varsha Turkar. Overall, this Drone Design and Aviation workshop was hosted and concluded successfully.