After Chennai startup, IIT Guwahati too develops drone to sanitise large areas
Several students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, is rolling out a drone with an automated sprayer to sanitise large areas including roads, parks and footpaths, to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
The student group, that includes a start-up called "Racerfly", has approached the Assam and Uttarakhand governments offering to join the fight the coronavirus pandemic with their sprayer system which they claim can accomplish an activity in less than quarter-hour which would otherwise have a person 1.5 days of work.
In Tamil Nadu too, student engineers from Agni College of Technology and professionals from startup Garuda Aerospace fitted drones with disinfectant spraying mechanisms, which are now being employed by the Chennai Corporation to sanitise large areas.
On March 23, a pilot procedure was conducted to spray disinfectants in the region around Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital. Since that time, Garuda Aerospace which includes 300 drones has been getting enquiries from Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh among other states.
IIT Guwahati Civil engineering student Anant Mittal said their sprayer system can be deployed and operated by simply one operator, eliminating the necessity for a number of cleaners manually spraying disinfectants. Also, these drones can be utilised to record videos.
“The drone which is crash proof, is equipped to adapt itself to terrain height and avoid obstacles,” Mittal said.
"The roads and areas could be selected on Google maps and the drone could be automated to perform the task within a signal selection of 3 km. A drone can cover a lot more than 1.2 hectare in one flight and a lot more than 60 hectares a day," he added.
The five-member team said the drone can spray two to four litres of disinfectant each and every minute and will be filled twice for just one charge.
"An individual drone can replace around 20 workers. Once we get a just do it, we are able to make 15 drones within 15-20 days and then 50 by the end of the month," Mittal said.
Source: www.deccanchronicle.com
