News

  • "Vibhram" Selected Among Top Innovations for Army Day

    The High Efficiency Dissimilar Coaxial Helicopter design called "Vibhram" a novel helicopter design....

  • Success in First Round of 2018 UAS Flight and Payload Challenge

    A design concept paper submitted by a team (called EndureAir) of students from MAV and VTOL lab of Aerospace Engineering department and guided by Professor Abhishek recently won the first stage of "the Unmanned Aerial Systems Flight and Payload Challenge"...

  • Third Prize in AHS Student Design Competition

    "Vibhram" a novel helicopter design by a team of post graduate students (two PhD and six MTech) from Aerospace Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur have won third prize in the graduate category of 34th Annual Student Design Competition organized by the American Helicopter Society (AHS).

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Micro Air Vehicle and VTOL Laboratory

 

Dr. Abhishek

Associate Professor
Department of Aerospace Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
abhish(at)iitk.ac.in, Ph: +91-512-2597515 (O)

Professional Interest

A commitment to education through teaching and research in broad areas of: rotary wing aeromechanics, Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) systems, autonomous / intelligent rotary wing micro / unmanned air vehicles (MAV / UAV), and inverse flight dynamics simulation with applications to experimentation, analysis and design.

Education

Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering (Rotorcraft Dynamics), University of Maryland, College Park

M.S., Aerospace Engineering (Rotorcraft Dynamics), University of Maryland, College Park

B.Tech., Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Research Interests

  • Helicopter dynamics and aeroelasticity
  • Helicopter design
  • Inverse flight dynamics simulation for helicopters
  • Design and analysis of autonomous hover capable MAV and UAV
  • Unconventional VTOL/STOL systems
  • Adaptive rotors
  • Wind turbines
  • Finite Element Analysis and Multibody Dynamics

Latest Happenings

DD News did a documentary on the design and development of autonomous helicopter at IIT Kanpur.

 

NAAVIK auto-pilot has now been tested and proven on a flybarless 700 class helicopter Align T-Rex. Attitude stabilization, height hold mode, translational rate command, GPS based position hold mode and way point navigation capability has been implemented and tested. 

Autonomous Mini Helicopter IIT Kanpur
 
Payload / package delivery systsem for aerial logistics has been developed at IIT Kanpur for the Autonomous RUAV platform. A demonstration of the mechanism is shown in the video below.

Below is the demonstration of aggressive attitude tracking for flipping the helicopter and achieving autonomous inverted flight. This work is joint effort between IIT Kanpur (Dr. Mangal Kothari and Dr. Abhishek) and IIT Bombay (Prof. Ravi Banavar).

Flight testting started for battery powered Variable Pitch Quadrotor being developed at MAVL. Goal is to make a quadrotor powered by IC engine for greater payload and longer flight times.

Variable Pitch Quadrotor

Below is the video of autonomous flight with waypoint navigation and auto landing.

NAAVIK is the new autopilot being developed for cross-platform operations. It has already been tested on a fixed wing UAV for fully autonomous flight. It has also been tested on coaxial MAV, flapping wing MAV and Quadrotor. Objective is to develop NAAVIK for application on wide range of UAV platforms.