Pune: Students of Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT), who built a drone that could operate in a GPS-denied environment like on Mars, won the Isro Robotics Challenge —URSC 2025. The results were announced on Aug 23. This year’s challenge was to develop autonomous navigation for an aerial vehicle without external navigation aids, such as GNSS, pseudolites, or reflector arrays, with a tagline: ‘Fly me to Mars.’The nine-member team included Aryan Shukla, Toshit Warke, Bhavika Panpalia, Atharva Joshi, Dhawal Talele, Nandini Deshmukh, Kaushal Chaudhari, Hrushikesh Patwardhan, and Nimish Satav and were mentored by Sandeep Gaikwad, associate professor in electronics and telecommunication department.He said the students started working on the project last year in their second year and competed with 510 teams from all over India, including IITs and NITs, to win. “The drone is capable of operating in a GPS-denied environment, scanning the terrain to identify safe landing spots, and landing on each of them by itself. The challenge was inspired by Mars-like conditions where there is no GPS and no usable magnetic field, making traditional navigation methods unreliable,” Gaikwad added.The students said they used a Raspberry Pi wide camera running optical flow algorithms for localisation and a 1D LiDAR for altitude reading. For scanning, they integrated a 2D LiDAR mounted on a servo, enabling a 110° by 160° sweep to create a depth map of the surface. “Essentially, we developed a low-cost approach to convert a 2D LiDAR into a 3D LiDAR. From the depth map, gradients and computer vision techniques were applied to identify safe landing zones,” Satav, the team leader, from the computer science department said.The project cost Rs 50,000 to 60,000 but some competing teams had installed cameras that cost as much. The PICT team had to construct a 9x12m Mars-like arena on campus and rigorously test the drone across multiple scenarios and edge cases. “During the final round, our drone crashed during flight. We were able to repair it,” Patwardhan said. They received a cash prize of Rs 10 lakh.
