Sai Pattabiram
ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS : BSC. ( MATHS ) , MBA SIBM , PUNE UNIVERSITY
Right after finishing MBA in 1981 , the Road Less Travelled has always had a special appeal to Sai.
Starting out in early 1982, a career of 4 decades in India and abroad has been a career of experiences spanning new products across a range of Industries covering Composites , Manufacturing , Defense, Steel , Consumer Durables and Electronics.
Sai has nurtured & grown Sree Sai Aerotech Innovations Pvt Ltd (SSAI ) , Chennai recognized by the Department Of Science & Technology to be among a handful of India’s most technologically innovative company’s with clients spread across both the automobile and aerospace sectors .
The entrepreneurial journey led to a Globally Proprietary Artificial Intelligence centric Embedded Electronic control & communication technology that today is at the convergence of future Aerial and Ground Mobility marketed under the brand name ZUPPA.
ZUPPA products can work equally well on a Drone as well as a Driverless Taxi on the ground. ZUPPA is looking to address the electronic control and communication needs of the likes of Uber , Amazon & Zomato rising from the ground to meet the Airbus , Boeing and Bell coming down from the highest altitudes of thousands of feet .
More than just airlines and aircraft manufacturing, the aerospace industry includes original equipment manufacturing (OEM), avionics, electronics, rockets, space vehicles, satellites, and drones.
The aerospace industry is also exploring the use of drones to provide inspections of commercial aircraft. With traditional technology, visual inspections can take up to six hours, but drones could significantly reduce the amount of time and provide increased accuracy and ease of documentation. When combined with visual processing algorithm systems, the footage gathered by the drones could send service work orders to an aircraft’s maintenance team as soon as a fault is identified. This could lead to greatly reduced maintenance service costs and improved overall safety.
Enabling safe commercial and private drone usage even over crowed places
Parachute safety solution manufacturer Drone Rescue Systems GmbH supports the European research project Formation flight for in-Air Launcher 1st stage Capturing demonstration (FALCon). Under the leadership of DLR, research is being conducted on how launch vehicles can be returned to the launch site as efficiently as possible for re-use.
“We are proud to be part of the FALCon research project together with five international partners and DLR as part of HORIZON2020 (EC grant 821953), the EU’s largest research and innovation program to date. The capture and towing of rocket stages in flight, i.e. an autonomous and safe landing, is a particularly interesting topic for us as a manufacturer of parachute safety solutions,” says Andreas Ploier, CEO of Drone Rescue Systems GmbH, in a press release.
Identifying foreign objects on runways at US airports
Seattle, USA-based provider of aerospace testing, engineering, and certification services, AeroTEC, has completed two proof-of-concept drone surveys at airports in Washington state.
The aerial surveys, in collaboration with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Aviation Division, took place at Sunnyside Municipal Airport and Prosser Airport.
Designed to assess the use of photogrammetry to evaluate runway obstacles, this was the first time the technique had been used for WSDOT Aviation’s 5010 airport inspections.
AeroTEC’s Part 107 pilots flew a drone to capture a series of images which were then used to create virtual models of the airports. The models were then analyzed and used to identify obstacles in a predetermined area near the end of each runway as required by the Federal Aviation Regulations.
By using the drone-enabled photogrammetry technology, AeroTEC was able to provide WSDOT with a runway obstacle report with a far higher degree of accuracy and lower cost than traditional methods.
Drone Delivery Network
In June 2019, PT Garuda Indonesia signed a deal with Beihang UAS Technology in China creating a network of cargo drones that can fly automatically across the entire country using dedicated landing strips. Thirty different logistic centers will be created across the entire country, each with a landing strip for the drones.
These drones are not the ones carrying little more than a camera; they have a wingspan of 18m, a range of 1,200km, and a cargo capacity of 2.2 tons. In effect, they are small aircraft that can be remotely operated from the logistic centers.
Inspection of the externals of a facility
Camera drones are currently being used to make sure that birds’ nests are not blocking gutters. This greatly reduces the inspection time compared to a manual inspection. The drone can also be used to scare birds away, and discourage them from nesting there is the future!
Inspection drones are also being trialled by airlines such as Easyjet. In this case, they are being developed to carry out aircraft pre-flight inspections fully autonomously. The drone has an advantage over a human inspector because they can see the top surfaces of the wings and fuselage very easily.
Now, skilled employees can spend time analyzing the data collected from the drones instead of spending hours manually inspecting aircrafts. This will help lower costs and achieve extreme efficiency in the industry. Drones can also prevent injuries on the job as they wouldn’t require employees to use a lift to access the top of an aircraft.
