SURANG-SUTRA
A roll-and-fly scout and relay pucks for mine rescue.
A mine-rescue design: an X-quad inside a rotating geodesic cage, plus a cassette of five communication-only relay pucks. Shortlisted for Stage 2 of the Vishwakarma Awards 2026-27.
Design stage · no hardware built · Vishwakarma Awards 2026-27 Stage 2 shortlist
What I built
In a dark, GPS-denied mine gallery the operator link has to survive each bend, and the floor can hold debris or water.
- SURANG is a collision-tolerant scout: an X-quad inside a single-axis rotating geodesic cage that rolls on a sound floor and flies over debris or water.
- SUTRA is a cassette of five communication-only relay pucks. The scout drops one before each bend to keep the operator link alive in dark, GPS-denied galleries.
- Published KiCad schematics for the relay puck and avionics interconnect (ERC clean), with a pin map, power budget and costed BOM.
- Added a parametric FreeCAD assembly, STEP/STL exports, clearance and puck-exit checks, and cage-impact analysis with a mesh-convergence study. The analysis motivated thicker cage struts, a wider axle, softer hub caps and an offset puck cassette.
- Design stage only: no hardware has been built or measured, and every figure is a target or a calculation. The design is not intrinsically safe and not DGMS, ATEX or IECEx certified.
- AI tools assisted with the CAD scripting, the analysis code and the renders. The design decisions, review and fabrication are the team's.
Tools: KiCad, FreeCAD, Python, ESP32-C3, LoRa, ArduPilot.
Website & project links
This project is documented here as a prototype or source project. A current deployed website has not been verified.
- Public repository ↗https://github.com/https-shubhamsahu/surang-sutra-vishwakarma
Recent build notes
- SURANG-SUTRA: checking the cage and puck exit before fabrication. — The Stage 2 repository now includes a parametric FreeCAD assembly, STEP/STL exports, clearance checks and cage-impact analysis.
- SURANG-SUTRA design files and a refreshed robotics resume. — My Embedded Robotics resume now covers SURANG-SUTRA, a mine-rescue scout and relay-puck design shortlisted for Stage 2 of the Vishwakarma Awards 2026-27.
About the builder
Shubham Sahu is the founder of NO SUS and co-founder of Aurigen, based in Mumbai. He builds privacy-focused software, web and mobile applications, embedded systems, and robotics, alongside studying Electronics & Computer Engineering at TSEC.
Shubham Sahu’s official profile and social accounts ↗