01
Explore
Move through an unfamiliar environment and perform the required survey.
ISRO Robotics Challenge — IRoC-U 2026 · Case Study
ASCEND
Towards Swarm Expedition
Our 2026 story of turning a challenging autonomous-flight problem into a complete robotic exploration concept.
Autonomous Exploration
GPS-Denied Environment
Aerial Robotics
- Event
- IRoC-U 2026
- Theme
- ASCEND — Towards Swarm Expedition
- Institute
- YCCE Nagpur
- Result
- 3rd Position · National
01 The Challenge
How do you make a flying robot explore on its own?
IRoC-U 2026 challenged teams to work on autonomous aerial exploration without relying on conventional external navigation aids. The mission combined exploration, navigation, feature detection, return and recovery.
02
Understand
Use onboard sensing and vision to make sense of the environment.
03
Return
Complete the mission and return safely to the base for the next stage.
02 Our Perspective
For us, ASCEND was never just a drone.
It was a robotic system where the vehicle and its base had to work together.
03 Our Approach
Keep the idea simple. Make the system capable.
Instead of presenting every technical component, we focus on the bigger picture: sensing, navigation, vision, communication and autonomous recovery working as one system.
S
Sense
Collect information from the environment and the vehicle.
N
Navigate
Estimate movement and maintain controlled autonomous flight.
V
Visualize
Use vision and computing to support exploration and understanding.
C
Communicate
Keep the aerial system connected with its base.
R
Recover
Support safe return, landing and the next mission stage.
A
Adapt
Build redundancy into the overall concept for a more robust mission.
04 The Journey
From an idea to a national result.
The project grew through design, integration, testing and repeated refinement — with every stage bringing the system closer to the mission we imagined.
- 01
Understand
Break down the challenge.
- 02
Design
Shape the system concept.
- 03
Build
Bring the idea together.
- 04
Test
Find problems and improve.
- 05
Compete
Take the system to the national stage.
05 What Stood Out
Two ideas shaped our approach.
Smarter connection
We explored a direction-aware communication concept to keep the aerial vehicle and base connected more reliably during movement.
More than one way to find the way
We explored a secondary vision-based navigation concept to add another layer of support in a GPS-denied environment.
06 The Result
AIR 03
National Position
Team Titans secured Third Position nationally with the cash prize of 5,00,000 /- in IRoC-U 2026 under the theme “ASCEND — Towards Swarm Expedition”.
IRoC-U 2026National innovation challenge
Top 20National finalists
3rdNational position
07 The Team
Meet the Titans
Guided by our mentors — Dr. Sandip Khedkar & Mr. Niket Malusare — and built by a passionate group of innovators, engineers and problem solvers driven by curiosity and the ambition to build meaningful technology.
Mentors
Dr. Sandip Khedkar
Mr. Niket Malusare
Titans Squad — 2026
6 members
Anushka Gupta
Aman Sharma
Manthan Mowale
Ayush Rodekar
Om Jumle
Shreyash Khedgarkar
We didn’t just build a machine that could fly.
We built a story around making it explore.