Drone-making is now a child's play
Children as young as 10 are part of drone making workshops, even in smaller towns
Darsh Parekh spent last Sunday learning how to assemble a drone at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He painted it grey, downloaded an app and was all set for his maiden flight as a drone pilot.Parekh was one of about 25 people at the campus that day for a session by Drona Aviation, a startup that was hatched in the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), an incubator at IIT Bombay.
The company has been running classes for the last five months and thus far more than 600 people have taken part.
Like Parekh, who's 14, a lot of them are in school and have a bent toward things mechanical. Parekh, for instance, likes to build traffic circuits and remote-controlled cars. But the fascination for flying objects cuts across all ages and disciplines.
"There is excitement in flying and we have many a layman who knows nothing about mechanical engineering or robotics wanting to build a drone," said Apurva Godbole, CEO of Drona Aviation. "The idea is to build with one's own hands and in the process, if it crashes, you know how to fix it as well."
Amateur drone pilots must necessarily curb their enthusiasm and restrict themselves to flying the machines indoors or far away from public spaces or even for aerial photography , the last having become derigueur at weddings in India. The sale of drones for commercial purposes is not allowed in India, unless approved by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, owing to concerns about safety and security.
A day-long session run by Drona costs Rs 1,500 and includes a kit that can be assembled. To make it fly , you'll need to plug in Drona's motherboard and get training on how to use the controller app. For another Rs 5,000, you get to keep your new drone, otherwise you take home just the kit.
Several schools have got Drona to run classes, including the American School of Bombay and Euro Airoli in Mumbai and Navrachana International School in Vadodara. Drona has sold about 200 functional drones, Godbole said.
Avi Agarwal, 14, was another of the budding drone pilots at the Powai campus on Sunday. He'd actually got an aerial vehicle as a gift two years ago but the device disappeared during one of its flights.
He's into remote-controlled cars and has been a regular at robotics classes in school. For the last two years he'd been searching for just something like this -someone who could teach him to build a drone and also fix it after a crash.
Such classes aren't restricted to the metros. Zepto Learning Centre in Vadodara conducts classes in app development and robotics for students from classes six to 10.
It held a drone-making workshop this summer and saw a full house with 35-40 children. At the premier engineering colleges such as the IITs, students from the aerospace and electrical engineering are increasingly keen on drones.
http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/drone-making-is-now-a-childs-play/53072568
