We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Srinivasulu Reddy about their original and creative Cardboard Drone design work. Srinivasulu Reddy is an award-winning industrial designer, that makes our world a better place with their original cardboard drone works.
Srinivasulu Reddy ("SR") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work ahaDRONE Kit Cardboard Drone. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
SR : It happens many times that we buy a product and right when we switch it on, we realise that the button is a little too small or too big or some other feature is not serving the intended purpose, this happens inspite of having the most empathetic team of designers put their thoughtful selves into the development. I firmly believe that design and development of a product is an ongoing process, it’s never really done until the product itself is put out of use. The idea of keeping a product open for development even after it is in the hands of the enduser is what motivated us to take up pursue this project.
SR : By keeping the the engineering work and the intellectual properties as open sources, we wanted to allow the end users to extrapolated the work we have done.
SR : We want to continue develop ahaDRONE along with user engagement to enhance user's experience at many levels.
SR : It took us well over a year to reach to this point.
SR : In our effort to keep our drone development costs to the minimum we started exploring the use of corrugated boards to build airframes of quadcopters, we realised that by reengineering the corrugation process we must be able to get a corrugated board suitable for aerospace applications, we needed to justify the cost of engineering, that is when we considered productising our work in the form of a do-it-yourself drone kit.
SR : We intend to manufacture ahaDRONE kits ourselves.
SR : The very idea of making a functional drone using cardboard was fascinating, and we also realised that it is an easier medium than EPP or plastic for the end user to make modifications. After several brainstorming sessions we came to a conclusion that a kit is the most effective way to reach to our targeted market.
SR : It is only through collaborations with established designers that we were able to realise the product, other than the actively collaborating teams and the influence of quantitative data I cannot recollect any major external influences.
SR : Our target customers include Educational Institutes, Recreational drones users and the members of DIY community.
SR : EPP, Plastic, aluminium and carbon fibre are the mainstream material used to construct quadcopter, however we came across few drone projects made using alternative material such as foam, wood and cardboard, these were more of a DIY projects than finished products.
SR : Earlier to this project we were working to build an ecosystem of opensource gadgets based on cardboard, 3D printed and electronic components for which we had been considering the name “ahaTHINGS”, it struck us positively to use the prefix “aha” and add it to “DRONE”, call it “ahaDRONE”, everyone agreed and we are using it.
SR : PTC Creo, Rhino 3D, KiCAD EDA Tool and Arduino Studio.
SR : Making a drone using a corrugated board, one that functions as well as a copter built using a plastic airframe is the most unique aspect of our design.
SR : Besides our diverse in-house engineering team which includes domain experts in CAD, electronics, software and avionics we closely worked with Guru at Guru Artz, who helped us modelling and Himanshu Gupta at NR Containers who helped us getting the kind of corrugated medium we were looking for, several other individuals provided valuable inputs and feedback at important times, we are thankful for all of them.
SR : Besides engineering the corrugated board, ahaDRONE development involved developing the flight controller hardware, integrating the opensource autopilot software and designing the airframe using CAD/CAE tools.
SR : ahaDRONE, it begin a flying machine, required a sufficient amount of quantitive analysis while developing the corrugated medium and the airframe. Developing and calibrating the autopilot required a fair amount of research.
SR : Once we decided to pay attention to the existing process of making corrugated boards, we assessed the process, which has largely remained unchanged for over a 100 years, We reimagined the corrugation process to get the desired boards, but we had challenges in every stage, such as experimenting with different types of paper, glue or processes, we could overcome these challenges with the help of our corrugation partners, who allowed us to experiment with their machines.
SR : We received lot of appreciation for ahaDRONE, we thought of submitting to both national and international competitions, a little bit of recognition will boost the moral of all the teams that contributed to towards the project.
SR : We were convinced that we could build a cardboard drone, while off the shelf corrugated board didn’t meet our requirements, we decided to engineer the process of making corrugated boards to suit our application, now that we have built a fully functional cardboard drone using corrugated boards we made, we realised that being persistent helped us get here.
