Sourav Sinha

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Sourav Sinha, a two-time Vertical Flight Foundation Scholarship winner, is a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, one of the premier engineering universities in India. Sourav first won the scholarship as an undergraduate in 2018 after working on a novel design for a quadrotor convertiplane unmanned aircraft system (UAS) under the supervision of his advisor, Dr. Abhishek. This research was presented at Forum 73. He won the scholarship again at the M.S. level in 2019.

How did you get interested in vertical flight?

I started developing an interest in STEM in high school, and it was the book ‘Wings of Fire’ that really inspired me to pursue aerospace engineering as a career. This book is an autobiography of former President of India and an eminent aerospace scientist, the late Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. In my sophomore year of college, I started working under the supervision of Dr. Abhishek. My first project was on modeling and simulation of a quadrotor for which I started reading about rotary wing air vehicles extensively. I was very entranced by the concept of hybrid vertical lift aircrafts due to their ability to combine the best of fixed wing and rotary wing vehicles. A desire to acquire sound technical knowledge in the rapidly advancing field inspired me to explore them in detail. In my junior year, I worked on design and development of a novel quadrotor convertiplane UAV which was later presented at the 73rd [VFS] Annual Forum.

What impact has receiving the VFF scholarship had for you?

Receiving the VFF scholarship in 2018 was one of the biggest achievements of my aerospace career. It helped me reduce the financial burden and allowed me to completely center my brain towards research. More importantly, it gave me enormous fulfillment knowing that the work I have done so far has a significance in the research community. This reinforced my self-confidence and spurred me to pursue this field further. I am really grateful to the AHS community for this encouragement and appreciation.

What are some of your current projects or research interests?

I am currently working on the autopilot development for the convertiplane as part of my Master’s thesis. I had the opportunity to present a part of this work at the 74th Annual Forum.

What do Sourav's mentors have to say?

Sourav has been working towards development of an autopilot for a novel convertiplane UAV concept, that we intend to eventually develop as a personal aerial vehicle concept. For this, he developed a flight dynamics model and used it to carry out control design for different flight modes of the convertiplane. He then fabricated a prototype and has been working towards conducting flight tests to evaluate the performance of the controller during different flight modes of the UAV. It has been a great learning experience for both Sourav and me to work together on this exciting multidisciplinary problem of vertical flight technology that has kept us on our toes by throwing fresh new technical challenges on a daily basis. But, I am confident that Sourav would solve them all through hard work and perseverance, to achieve success.

Dr. Abhishek
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur