Speakers Biodata
Keynote/Invited - Master class
Topic - Role of aerodynamics and flight dynamics in design of innovative high efficiency VTOL systems
Biodata -Dr. Abhishek is an Associate Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Kanpur. He is a recipient of President's Silver Medal for topping B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering course at IIT Kharagpur. After which he pursued MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from University of Maryland, College Park, USA, during which he won the first prize in the American Helicopter Society Student Design Competition in 2005. He is a recipient of INAE-SERB Abdul Kalam technology innovation national fellowship for year 2018 and IIT Kanpur Class of 1979 Research Fellowship in 2017. He was the Faculty Advisor of a team of students that won 3rd prize in the graduate category of 34th Vertical Flight Society Student Design Competition in 2017. His research interests include, helicopter aeromechanics, VTOL unmanned aerial systems, guided projectiles and high efficiency wind turbines. He has established Helicopter Dynamics and VTOL Laboratory at IIT Kanpur with funding from HAL, DRDO and DST.
Keynote/Invited - Master class
Topic - Automatic take-off and landing
Biodata - Dr Vijay Patel is a senior member of the National Control Law Team (since 1995) for LCA, and has been involved in the design, development and testing of flight control system of LCA for all three variants i.e., airforce, trainer and naval version. His major contributions include the successful design and development of flight control laws, notch filters to avoid airframe structural response coupling, verification of the flight control system performance in the iron bird and on aircraft during ground tests, and flight test data analysis. He also headed the cross wind landing interdisciplinary committee and successfully cleared crosswind landing for LCA for all its configurations through flight testing. He was also responsible for estimation of aerodynamic coefficients from flight test data using nonlinear parameter estimation techniques which enabled flight validation of the aerodynamic data thereby allowing the aircraft to expand its flight envelope to higher angles of attack, normal acceleration and lower speeds. He played a major role in developing boundary limiting features in flight control laws which in turn enabled to expand the flight envelope safely, more rapidly without compromising safety and led to achieve Initial and Final operational clearance (IOC& FOC) of the control laws). He played major role in building various enhanced capabilities for LCA such as excellent HQ towards Air to Air refueling task, Auto Low Speed Recover functionality, Disorientation Recovery, Critical Altitude recovery etc.
Dr. Patel also contributed in feasibility studies for other projects in ADA, shared LCA CLAW Design Development experience with other national projects ( LCH (HAL-RWRDC, RLV (ISRO) various UAV projects of ADE, etc., ). Moreover, he has solved three open theoretical problems in Mathematical Control Literature and has used L1-Adaptive and Hinfinity Control Theory for Practical Flight Control applications. Dr. Patel obtained his PhD in the area of robust control from IIT Kharagpur and did his post doctoral research at Virginia Tech, USA in the areas of flight control, coordinated path following for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and adaptive flight control design for unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). Dr. Patel has published more than 70 technical papers in peer reviewed international journals and conferences.
He is recipient of INSA “Young Scientist Award”, INAE “Young Engineer Award”, ISCA "YoungScientist Award in Engineering Sciences" and other awards from NAL and DRDO.Dr. Patel was also awarded as DRDO Scientist of the year award in the year 2013. Dr. Vijay V. Patel is currently Outstanding Scientist and Group Director, Flight control laws LCA Airforce at ADA Bangalore.
Keynote/Invited - Master Class
Topic -Swarm of small, flying robots
Biodata - VIJAY KUMAR is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1987. He has been on the Faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania since1987.
In addition to holding many administrative positions at Penn, Kumar has served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2012 – 2013). His lab has spun off many startups in robotics, and he is the founder of Exyn Technologies. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
Dr. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and was the chief editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, RSS 2013, ICRA 2014, BICT 2015, and MARSS 2016 and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010. He is the recipient of the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, a 2012 World Technology Network (wtn.net) award, a 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award, the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award, the 2017 ASME Robert E. Abbott Award, the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award, and the 2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Field Award.He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 and the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Keynote/Invited - Master class
Topic -Recent developments in sense-and-avoid technology for UAV
Biodata -Suresh Sundaram is an associate professor in Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India from 2018. He is leading the WIPRO-IISc joint research initiative on Artificial Intelligence driven Autonomous System. Prior to the current appointment, he was a faculty in School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore between 2010-2018. During the period, he served as a cluster director in Energy Research Institute @ NTU and deputy director at Robotics Research Center, NTU.
Dr. Suresh received his bachelor of engineering from the Bharathiar University in 1995 and his master in engineering (2001) and Ph.D from Indian Institute of Science in 2005. He has been associate editor in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning System, Swarm and Evolutionary Computing and Evolving System. He was the general chair for IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence in 2018 and Publication chair in 2013. His research interest include intelligent flight control, autonomous system, applied game theory and artificial intelligence.
Keynote/Invited - Keynote
Topic - Opportunities and challenges for autonomy in micro aerial vehicles
Biodata - VIJAY KUMAR is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1987. He has been on the Faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania since1987.
In addition to holding many administrative positions at Penn, Kumar has served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2012 – 2013). His lab has spun off many startups in robotics, and he is the founder of Exyn Technologies. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
Dr. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and was the chief editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, RSS 2013, ICRA 2014, BICT 2015, and MARSS 2016 and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010. He is the recipient of the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, a 2012 World Technology Network (wtn.net) award, a 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award, the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award, the 2017 ASME Robert E. Abbott Award, the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award, and the 2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Field Award.He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 and the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Keynote/Invited - Keynote
Topic - Metrics and semantics navigation and mapping of UAVs
Biodata - Rakesh “Teddy” Kumar, Ph.D., is Vice President, Information and Computing Sciences and Director of the Center for Vision Technologies at SRI International. In this role, he is responsible for leading research and development of innovative end-to-end vision solutions from image capture to situational understanding that translate into real-world applications such as robotics, intelligence extraction and human computer interaction. He has received the Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development award from his alma mater, University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Sarnoff Presidents Award, and Sarnoff Technical Achievement awards for his work in registration of multi-sensor, multi-dimensional medical images and alignment of video to three-dimensional scene models. The paper “Stable Vision-Aided Navigation for Large-Area Augmented Reality” co-authored by him received the best paper award in the IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 conference. The paper “Augmented Reality Binoculars” co-authored by him received the best paper award in the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2013 conference.
Kumar has served on NSF review and DARPA ISAT panels. He has also been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has co-authored more than 60 research publications, and received more than 50 patents. A number of spin-off companies have been created based on the research done at the Center for Vision Technologies. Kumar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992. His M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering is from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995, and his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering is from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1983.
Keynote/Invited - Keynote
Biodata - Dr S Venugopal, Outstanding Scientist is Director of Aeronautical Development Establishment. He joined DRDO on 26th Dec 1986 and worked in the field of Aerodynamics and Aero Structures of missiles system for a period of 10 years. During this period, he was deputed to National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore for 4+ years from 1988-93. He worked for the BrahMos missile systems from 1997 for a period of 12 years. He was the Deputy project Director and Head, Mechanical Integration for this programme upto 2006. He was deputed to BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd in 2007 on appointment as Project Director (BrahMos – Air) which he served for 3 years. In addition to his appointment, he was given the full time responsibility to head the Company BrahMos Aerospace Ltd, Thiruvananthapuram as its Executive Director for two years (2008 & 2009). He was Project Director (Astra) and Programme Director during 2011-19 which is now to be inducted into Services.. He has been appointed as Director, ADE from May 2019.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic -Case study: Indian made mini UAVs for disaster and societal applications
Biodata -Dr K SenthilKumar graduated in the field of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Madras University during the year 1999. He pursued his Masters, in Avionics Engineering(2001) and Ph.D in UAV Design (2009) from Madras Institute of Technology(MIT) Campus of Anna University, Chennai.
During his stay in MIT, his interactions with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam kindled his interest in Unmanned Aerial Systems(UAS), an emerging field in the country, given a head start by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam himself. DrSenthil Kumar, hence after completion of his masters degree, decided to pursue his research in UAS at MIT, without taking up any employment which came in his way.Towards UAV research, Dr Senthilkumar has extensively travelled to countries like USA, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, China, Singapore, Dubai and Australia to demonstrate and present research papers in conferences and has won many awards. His research papers are published in leading international Journals and he has also published patents to his credit.
His research efforts culminated in the development of the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), Dhaksha developed under his leadership by the faculty and research students of MIT Campus of Anna University.Dhaksha with its most stable design, became the only UAV to have dominated against participating teams from developed countries, during the May 2012 Technology demonstration organized by DARPA, Department of Defence, USA and won huge appreciation. The UAS Dhaksha also won its appreciation from none other than Tamil Nadu Former Chief Minister (Late) Dr.J.Jayalalitha for the contribution made in saving precious lives during the Moulivakkam search and rescue operation. Dhaksha,also became the first of its kind UAV to have been deployed by civilian law enforcement agencies, thereby making them tech-savvy.In recognition of his contribution in deploying UAS in various law enforcement situations, the Hon'ble Chief Minister has awarded Rs.95 lakhs for supply of UAV to TamilNadu Police and training their personnel. In order to further his research efforts and to make Dhaksha UAV, a pioneer in the international drone scene for societal applications, the Department of Higher Education has sanctionedthe team for an award of Rs. 27 crores under TANII scheme out of the Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission funds. Dr Senthil Kumar, an outstanding technocrat has distinguished himself as a pioneer in the Indian UAV scene.Further the Tamil Nadu Government honored his team with Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Award-2018 on the eve of Independence Day Celebration at Chennai Fort on 15th August 2018 for the contribution through Unmanned Aerial Systems for Societal Applications. The Team Dhaksha also participated in the Australian UAV Medical Express Challenge 2018 and became the overall second best team out of 55 teams throughout the world and also secured highest first place in the flight round.The concept to translational research to end user capabilities of his UAV research had been vouched by various topmost civilian and military authorities in India and worldwide, notable being his Excellency our former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam.
Dr Senthil Kumar may best be described as an Entrepreneurial Scientist who with his practical mentoring approach to science had been able to identify and bring forth creative energies out of budding engineers and thereby making them innovators and potential leaders they are, in the field of Aerospace. The exceptionally Innovative Scientist, that he is capable of transforming the inert Indian UAV scene to that of a vibrant and potential competitor with the world players.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic -VTOL technologies for UAV and challenges
Biodata -Dr Raja is chief scientist and head structural technological division at CSIR-NAL Bangalore.He is an alumni of IIT Khargapur and IIT Bombay He has a text book, book chapters and more than 195 papers to his credit. He is recipient of DAAD fellowship and JSPS post doc fellowships.He is a renowned aeroelastician in the country. He has contributed in all the prime aero programs in the country and has received more than 16 national awards.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - RLV development
Biodata -Mr. V T Basker, ‘Outstanding Scientist’ is Project Director,Reusable Launch Vehicle Project, VSSC, ISRO. He has expertise in the fields of Static & dynamic testing, launch vehicle environments and vehicle integration. He also has a long experience in launch vehicle dynamics, mechanical systems& vibration isolation.He has a Bachelor’sdegree in Physics from Madurai Kamaraj University,B.Tech degree from MIT, Anna Universityand M.Techdegree in Machine Design, Mechanical Engineering from IIT, Madras. He joined VSSC in January ’87 and was working in Quality Assurance in the field of Static & Dynamic Testing, Vibration Isolation, Avionics Package design, Launch Vehicle Mechanical Systems, Vehicle Integration&Alignment and Launch Activities. He worked in GSLV Mk III Project as Deputy Project Director looking after Structural and Environmental Testing activities for five years from 2010. Subsequently, he moved to GSLV Project in 2016 as Associate Project Director, looking after Mechanical Systems, Fabrication, Structures, Vehicle Engineering, Vehicle Integration, Stage Auxiliary Systems and Configuration Control. He was also the Team Leader of Structural Analysis Team of Operational Launch Vehicles. He is Project Director, RLV from 2017 onwards.
Keynote/Invited -Invited
Topic -Hardware-In-Loop-Simulation for Swarms
Biodata -Prof. Hemendra Arya is Associate Professor at Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He obtained his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Jodhpur University and later obtained M.Tech. and Ph.D. from Aerospace Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. He has actively participated in National Programme on Micro Aerial Vehicle sponsored by DST and AR&DB. His main interest is in Hardware-In-Loop-Simulation, UAV system development, Systems Engineering.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Requirements for UCAV
Biodata -
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic -UAV for societal applications
Biodata -Rahul Ramanna obtained his MS from Georgia institute of Atlanta in aerospace engineering with specialisation in aircraft design and multi disciplinary optimisation. He works as lead engineer at general aeronautics private limited Bangalore as lead engineer. He has responsible for GA-3 program. He had earlier worked at ADA.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Conceptual design of VTOL platforms for next generation air vehicles
Biodata - Bharath Govindarajan is currently an assistant professor in the department of aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland and has published multiple journal articles and conference papers largely in the field of rotorcraft aerodynamics and rotorcraft design. His research thus far has been primarily focused on two fronts; understanding rotorcraft aerodynamics through numerical modelling at various levels of fidelity, and developing methods for conceptual design of aircraft. These tools range from lifting-line based free-vortex methods to computational fluid dynamics for rotorcraft simulations.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Autonomous control of a biplane-quadrotor tail sitter UAV
Biodata -Dr. Mangal Kothari is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India. His research interests fall broadly under the area of navigation, guidance, and control of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Security and privacy concerns of a fleets of drones: potential solution
Biodata -Dr G K Patra,is working as a Senior Principal Scientist in the High Performance Computing and Cyber Security group at the CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute, which was earlier known as CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulations. He is also a Professor and the Associate Dean, Mathematical and Information Sciences, of Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), which is an institute of national importance by Government of India Act of Parliament.
His fields of interest include various security aspects of current generation Cyber Physical Systems and High Performance computing. At present, he is engaged in research on security and safety of connected vehicles using Artificial Intelligence, Blockchainand cryptography. He has published about50 research papers in reputed journals and refereed conference proceedings. He has many best paper awards in International Conferences for providing security solutions based on neural networks and chaos. He received his postgraduate and Ph.D. degree in Electronics from Berhampur University in the year 1994 and 2002 respectively. He has supervised two Ph.D. students and many are currently carrying out research for their degree.
He is one of the key members who made significant contributions in establishing one of the largest supercomputing facilities of the country at CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute.In additions he is member industrial advisoryboard and board of studies of many Post-graduate and Engineering institutions in the country. He is also an adjunct faculty at Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Safety critical fault tolerant control-develop, test & certify
Biodata - Dr. Yogananda Jeppu is a BE in Electronics and Communication, from Mangalore University, a Post Graduate in Missile Guidance and Controls from Pune University. He has a PhD in certification of safety critical control systems using Model Based Techniques from IIT Bombay. He has been working in the field of control system design and implementation, simulation of aerospace systems, verification and validation for aircrafts and missiles for the past 32 years. He has several publications on Formal Methods, Requirements, Safety, Artificial Intelligence, Randomized Testing, Orthogonal Array Testing and Missile Guidance and Control. He has two patents on Model Based Design and Radar application.
He started his career in 1987, working on missiles and the Indian Light Combat Aircraft program with Defense R&D Organization. He is currently working in Honeywell Technology Solutions as a Principal Systems Engineer in the Electronics Solutions Division. He is a member of the UAM Community of Practice at Honeywell. He is an office bearer of the INCOSE India Chapter. He is also an adjunct faculty at Manipal Institute of Technlogy.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic -Multi-application radio frequency beacon for unmanned vehicle
Biodata -Dr.LaveenVikramSundararaj has a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering and is also an Alumnus of IIMB. With 18+ years of experience in Aero embedded systems, he is currently an Engineering Manager with Collins Aerospace working on Military Avionics. As an avid inventor, he has few patents and a number of publications to his credit. Dr.Sundararaj is also a member of the board of studies at Alagappa University, Karaikudi.
Biodata -Harish B Jayaraj has around 2 decades of leadership experience in Avionics embedded systems in the areas of Cockpit Heads up and Heads down Displays, Comm, Navigation & surveillance, System Engineering domains. Has a patent and part of PMI & INCOSE initiatives in the country. Part of the chorot for technical leadership institute within INCOSE.Architect for creating an Innovation culture in Collins Aerospace.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic -Manned unmanned teaming (MUM-T) command of skies in the coming decades
Biodata -Sameer Joshi is an ex Mirage-2000 fighter pilot with over 5000 hours in aviation,and has seen combat during the 1999 Kargil Operations. Post retirement from IAF, Sameer has worked as an entrepreneur while being a founding member at Team Indus, India’s entry into the Google Lunar X-Prize Challenge, which was an attempt from private players across the world to design and develop a program to soft land a robotic craft on the lunar surface. He is currently the CEO at NewSpace Research & Technologies Pvt Ltd, a Bengaluru based start-up company, which is developing Next Generation Missions & Technologies in the Aerospace & Defence domains. Amongst various initiatives, NewSpace Research is designing a swarm based air and ground launched UAV system and a stratospheric unmanned high altitude pseudo satellite UAV for military and civilian applications. The technology development at NRT will help the Indian armed forces operate in the contested airspace of the future. Sameer is also an avid Aerospace & Defence analyst and writer, whose analysis of the Syrian Air war won the best military aviation submission at the Paris Airshow in 2017.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Design and testing of a new cargo drone configuration
Biodata -He began his studies in Aerospace Engineering in 2006. He studied at the Technical University of Braunschweig and at the French Grande École SUPAERO in Toulouse. In 2013 he started working at the German Aerospace Center DLR at the Institute of Flight Systems in Brunswick. In his Department, Flight Dynamics and Simulation, he worksspecially in the following fields: Flight Simulation, Flight Mechanics of Gyrocopter, Configurational Design and Icing.
Keynote/Invited - Invited
Topic - Challenges in operating an experimental 500 kg cargo UAS
Biodata -He began studying aerospace engineering at the DHBW Ravensburg University in 2013. After he got his Bachelor Degree in 2016 he studied at the Technical University Braunschweig and got his Master degree at the beginning of 2019. Parallel to his studies from 2013 he already started working at the Institute of Flight Systems of the German Aerospace Center DLR in the Department for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In that department he works on the development of flight critical onboard software, hardware in the loop simulation and testing including the conduction of flight tests.