Work Experience

1. Employer → Sara Group (www.sarasae.com, www.cpcmfg.com), Dehradun

Post → Project Head
Experience → July 2013 to present

      • Heading the development of RT138, a network aware real time smart diagnostics and early fault detection system for a wide variety of BOP Accumulator Units manufactured by the Sara Group.
      • Grew the team from just 2 to 12 in less than a year, consisting of a number of IIT BTechs and MTechs.
      • Pitched the RT138 to various prospective clients in USA, Kuwait, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the oil drilling industry.
      • Managed to bag pilot runs from Kuwait Drilling Company in Kuwait, Ensign Energy in Canada and Nabors Industries in USA.
      • The RT138 has been successfully installed at KDC Rig 33 and Rig 15 (highest land rigs in the world). Currently leading a highly inter-departmental process of commissioning the RT138 system for KDC Rig 50.

2. Employer → ThinkLABS Technosolutions Pvt Ltd, KReSIT, IIT Bombay

Post → Senior R&D Engineer
Experience → August 2012 to June 2013 (~1 year)

Managing overall development of the flagship product of the company, called RoboLAB, a robotics kit similar to Lego Mindstorms NXT. Responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:-

    • Leading the team in electronics hardware and firmware development
      • Writing and improving upon the existing firmware architecture of the product
      • Improving upon the existing hardware design while keeping an eye out to cut the costs
    • Hiring and managing design interns from National Institute of Design to improve the look and feel of the current product offerings
    • Coming up with new processes and methods to streamline workflow among teammates and other departments in a startup environment
    • Actively coordinating with the PC software development team, the content development team and the production department
    • Coming up with new product ideas while keeping in mind the long term vision of the company

3. Employer → Aerospace Department, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur

(A picture gallery of my work at IIT Kanpur)

Guide → Dr AK Ghosh (Dean, Student Affairs)
Post → Senior Project Associate
Experience → November 2009 to July 2012 (2 years 8 months)

Responsibilities → Leading the electronics group, my task was to conceptualize, formulate and design electronics & software from scratch for high end data acquisition, wireless telemetry and control systems that go into a wide range of projects. I was also the manager of the lab in the aerospace department where all these activities took place.

Projects :-

      1. Design of 5-DOF Dynamic Test Rig for Aerodynamic Characterization of Flight Vehicle

        • Sponsored by DRDO (Aeronautics Research and Development Board)

        • Project Description :- The 5 Degree of Freedom Rig is a facility that when put inside a wind tunnel can be used for dynamic testing of the aircraft and other airborne systems in order to develop and validate the nonlinear and unsteady aerodynamics model. It consists of a 2 DOF (pitch and yaw) gimbaled platform where the flight vehicle is mounted, a 3 DOF fulcrum (roll, heave and sway) about a fixed strut point and a compensator with 4 control surfaces having servo motors as actuators.

        • Responsibility :- Designed a complete wired data acquisition system from scratch which controlled on-board servo motors, acquired data from multiple potentiometers and two inertial measurement units, displayed and logged it in various formats on a PC running LabVIEW. Later the hardware was modified into a fully wireless system employing two embedded systems designed around the 16-bit dsPIC33FJ128MC804 DSC and multiple ZigBee units. Provision has been made in the design to control the servo motors either manually using the Futaba RC transmitter or automatically from a VI running on LabVIEW.

        • For more information on electronics and instrumentation of the rig, please click on This Link.

        • Videos of the fully instrumented Dynamic Testing Rig

        • Picture Gallery

      1. Parachute Assisted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

        • Project Description :- Design of a Variable Stability (VSA) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that can be used for surveillance purposes and can be recovered with the help of a parafoil mounted inside. The UAV features a retractable landing gear, an all movable horizontal and vertical tail, a twin engine, a blended wing configuration and can adapt to different configurations by changing wing sweep and length of the moment arm of tail.

        • Responsibility :- Designed an on-board data logging system which featured a high efficiency SMPS, a 32-bit PIC32 microcontroller and a USB pen drive interface on a 4-layered PCB to acquire data from multiple analog and digital sensors and logged it directly on the pen drive. The PIC32 firmware actually featured a complex multi-layered stack which included Microchip’s file system, SCSI command stack, mass storage client driver and the USB embedded host driver which converted the microcontroller into a USB embedded host. Though programmed to acquire data only from the ADC channels and digital I/O pins the system had the flexibility to acquire digital data from UART and SPI peripherals as well. 

        • For more information, please click on This Link.

      1. Micro Air Vehicle

        • Project Description :- The project requires design and manufacture of a light weight (<50gms) 150X150mm fully instrumented aircraft which can operate in an unmanned state for short intervals.

        • Responsibility :- Developed an extremely light weight RC system using COTS parts to fly the MAV, a miniature angle of attack and side-slip angle measurement sensor which employs a magnetic rotary encoder to measure the angles, installed an on-board inertial measurement unit, a dsPIC33FJ128MC804 DSC and a ZigBee module for wireless telemetry. The dsPIC33F features an interrupt based firmware which acquires data from the IMU via UART and from the magnetic encoder via quadrature encoder interface peripheral and transmits it to the base station via the ZigBee transceiver. 

        • For more information, please click on This Link.

        • Videos

        • Picture Gallery

      1. Parafoil

        • Project Description :- The project required instrumenting a parafoil to capture its dynamics which can be later analyzed and compared with the simulation results from the 9DoF mathematical model developed to estimate its dynamics theoretically.

        • Responsibility :- Developed a wireless inertial data telemetry system using COTS parts. A low cost IMU was mounted on-board the parafoil which was connected directly to a ZigBee transceiver module which wirelessly transmitted the IMU data directly to a laptop.

        • For more information, please click on This Link.

        • Picture Gallery

4. Employer → Thinnkware Pvt. Ltd., Noida

Post → Team Leader
Experience → May 2009 to October 2009 (6 months)

Responsibilities → Leading both the product development and marketing team the objective was to design, develop and deploy a maze solving autonomous robot kit and its related accessories (development board and programmer). The kit was designed around the 8-bit ATMega16 microcontroller. The development board featured a 16×2 LCD connector, on-board DC/Stepper motor driver ICs, general purpose I/O pins and analog input pins. Example firmware was also written which included code for interfacing with the LCD, driving the motors and interfacing with analog infra red distance ranging sensors. Project was completed and the product was launched in less than 6 months.