Hyderabad: India’s top defence scientist called for industry to work on the development of unmanned aerial vehicles which will play a major role in both the defence and civilian sectors.
Dr G. Satheesh Reddy, chairman of Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), said indigenous development of sensors would play a great role and revolutionise applications like UAVs for commercial and defence applications.
He said the defence ministry would organise a ‘drone Olympics’ during the forthcoming Aero India event here.
Dr Reddy, who is also chairman of the Aeronautical Society of India, said, there was a huge transformation in the areas of unmanned systems and associated technologies.
“UAVs are going to play a major role in both defence and civilian sectors. So there is an urgent need for industry to gear up and work in these areas,” Dr Reddy told a national conference, ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Opportunities and Challenges’, here. The conference was organised by the Aeronautical Society of India.
Dr Reddy highlighted the contributions of DRDO to design and develop UAVs, the Aeronautical Society of India said.
NITI Aayog member V.K. Saraswat, delivering a talk, ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Aerospace 4.0,’ said, “AI is one of the disruptive technologies, which is going to impact efficiency, productivity, speed and innovation in the emerging industries.”
He said Aerospace 4.0 would include all features of AI in the next 15 years to cut cost and cycle-time of design, optimisation, simulation, prototyping, manufacturing, supply chain, maintenance and product updates.
Agni-3 programme director V.V. Rao said aerospace sensor technology would play a vital role in the futuristic unmanned systems.
He said the scenario was changing fast with the emergence of nano technologies and miniature embedded systems.
Former Isro chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar and nearly 500 scientists, engineers, industrialists and professionals from the aerospace sector participated in the conference.
