New Delhi: Hi-tech unmanned aerial vehicles popularly known as drones will be used to monitor developmental projects in the North East with the help of the Shillong based North Eastern Space Application Centre (NESAC), official sources said here on Wednesday.
The Centre for Aerospace Research (CASR) of Anna University is already in collaboration with the NESAC in this regard.
The CASR, has expertise of preparing and handling UAV, and is likely to start the project from this month itself, the sources said.
In the first phase, at least five UAVs will be sent to Meghalaya for carrying out ground survey work for construction of roads in inaccessible areas and in subsequent phases, the project will be extended to other Northeastern states.
The CASR has already signed an agreement with NESAC in January under
which it will provide UAV-related support in carrying out different developmental projects in Northeastern region and the survey work for road construction is our first project there, the sources said.
CASR has developed specially designed drones for the project with the capacity to fly at high altitude. It will soon help the Northeastern states in construction of roads in difficult terrains by providing accurate information to them by using spatial technology.
The higher the UAV goes the more problems it faces as the air density decreases and atmospheric pressure also changes and keeping all these things in mind, the UAVs for this project had been designed and a special team of experts would handle the project.
The CASR officials said that earlier, satellites were used in conducting survey work but the accuracy of the information was not proper as images collected through satellites were of poor resolution. The images collected by UAVs will be of good quality and appropriate analysis can be done using those.
Earlier, the Minister for DoNER, Dr Jitendra Singh had said that the Centre will use NESAC to provide developmental support to the Northeastern using space science and technology.
The centre has the mandate to develop high technology infrastructure support to play a catalytic role in holistic development of the region by providing space science and technology support, he had said.
Incidentally, NESAC also comes under Dr Singh who is also the Minister for Space. This technology also known as eye in the sky as is utilised to check the actual work done on the ground.
