SBIR Phase I: Drones for Industrial Indoor Robotic Applications

The broader impact / commercial potential of this project would be in the ability to deploy drones in industrial and commercial indoor environments as aerial robots. A key requirement to deploying drones in such indoor environments in the presence of people is to make them safe and non-threatening. In addition, for drones to function as robots, they need to be made fully autonomous and minimize the need for human operation or intervention. These attributes are not possible with conventional drone technology today. The ability to use drones as aerial robots can open up opportunities in large markets such as warehouse inventory scanning, construction, security, and factory automation. Such robots can enable functions such as scanning and reconstruction of the environment, or also ?pick and place? at high throughput within factories. The use of drones in industrial indoor environments for these applications can also result in broader societal benefits, including improved worker safety inside industrial indoor environments (by performing tasks that may otherwise require harnesses, forklifts or ladders); reduced environmental impacts (in construction sites by catching discrepancies early and minimizing rework and material wastage) and macroeconomic benefits (enabling automated factories of the future and bringing back US jobs). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project has the potential to advance the frontiers of knowledge in design and control systems for use in drones and other applications. This unique approach redefines the control systems for rotorcraft, and enables a drone with dramatically improved metrics ? as much as 10X -- that are traditionally used to characterize the performance of drones. In this Phase I project, Vimaan plans to complete the design and modeling of the system, develop the control mechanisms for the system, and integrate, test and demonstrate the application of the innovation to a drone that has the above attributes. During the project, Vimaan will need to overcome some critical technical challenges in the components and systems design, the control circuitry and controls algorithms and the power budgets, timings and optimizations of the sub-systems for the required performance. If successful, such an innovation would revolutionize decades old legacy technologies that have been hitherto deployed in rotorcraft, and make possible attributes that have been long sought after by the aerospace industry. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.