The University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) here has claimed that it has entered the third and final phase of lockheed Martin Indian University Roll On/Roll off Mission Systems Design Challenge to manufacture payload prototype for military aircraft C-130 J Super Hercules.
The inter-university challenge was to propose an idea and subsequently design a Payload which ‘should be transportable on the C-130 Aircraft oriented towards improved Humanitarian Aid Support, Disaster Relief Operations, Medical Evacuation and Environmental/Weather missions’.
Out of five teams that participated in the challenge- UPES, IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, Delhi Technological University and BITS Pilani, UPES and IIT Madras won the challenge. UPES will receive a research grant of $40,000.00 from lockheed Martin to develop a prototype.
The Chief Executive Officer and President of UPES, Utpal Ghosh said that winning this prestigious competition is a fitting testimony of the technical competencies developed by the students during the course of their studies.
He added that the payload being developed by UPES team will help in saving considerable set-up time when every second counts.
The Dean, College of Engineering Studies (CoES) at UPES, Dr. Kamal Bansal explains, “In disaster situations and during relief operations a lot of initial response time is spent in setting up a working head-quarter from where relief teams can operate.
Our winning payload structure and its internal architecture has been developed to reduce initial response time as much as possible, technologically.
We aim to finish this project by next year and look forward to developing ideal head-quarters for large scale relief operations”.
The Principal Investigator of lockheed Martin Roll on/Roll off Design Challenge at UPES, Sudhir Joshi said that the team is developing a prototype keeping in mind significant inputs received from lockheed Martin, Tata Advanced Systems, DRDO, IAF officials, NDRF teams and in-depth understanding of ground-zero realities to make it suitable for scenarios like air drop and long storage period.
The students present during final presentation included Upsam Rai, Madhukar Khanna, Pravesh Kumar, Amitabh Yadav and Preeti Sharma.