MeitY Launches NIDAR 2.0 to Accelerate Indigenous Drone Innovation

Key facts

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in collaboration with the Drone Federation India (DFI), launched the second edition of the National Innovation Challenge for Drone Application and Research (NIDAR 2.0).
• NIDAR 2.0 challenges students to build autonomous drones and indigenous flight controllers powered by India's homegrown VEGA processor.
• The challenge offers a prize pool of more than Rs 65 lakh, along with startup incubation, cloud computing credits, software support and corporate internships.
• The VEGA processor is designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under MeitY's Microprocessor Development Programme and is based on the open-standard RISC-V architecture.
• The Drone Innovation track requires teams to build autonomous swarm drones for locating survivors and delivering medical supplies in disaster-hit areas, and GPS-denied drones for indoor industrial inspections.
• The Component Innovation track requires teams to design an indigenous flight controller and autopilot built around the VEGA processor using indigenous electronic components.
• The top 100 teams selected after technical evaluation will each receive two VEGA processor kits for development, testing and integration.