NIDAR 2.0

About NIDAR 2.0

• NIDAR 2.0 stands for National Innovation Challenge for Drone Application and Research.
• It is a National Innovation Challenge for students to build smarter drones powered by an Indian-made chip.
• It is under SwaYaan initiative- Capacity Building for Human Resource Development in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Drone and Allied Technologies).
• This 2026-27 edition is the second edition of the challenge.
  • The first edition of NIDAR 2025-26 was launched in March 2025.
  • Participation: It drew 3,448 students from 22 States, 4 Union Territories and 109 cities, who built autonomous drone solutions for Disaster Management and Precision Agriculture.
  • Ninety-three teams reached the Grand Finale, of which Twenty-four teams won prizes worth a total of Rs. 40 Lakh.
• Nodal Ministry: It has been hosted by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in collaboration with Drone Federation India (DFI).
• Features:
  • It moves the focus from conventional airframes to autonomous systems, indigenous avionics and core drone components.
  • Two tracks: The challenge runs across two tracks.
    • Track 1, Drone Innovation: It tasks student teams with building fully autonomous swarm drones that can locate survivors and deliver medical parcels in a disaster zone without any external communication network.
      • It also challenges teams to develop a GPS-denied drone capable of navigating confined indoor spaces for industrial inspection.
    • Track 2, Component Innovation: It challenges teams to design an indigenous flight controller and autopilot built around the VEGA processor, using indigenous electronic components.
  • After technical evaluation, the top 100 teams will each receive two VEGA processors kits for development, testing and integration.
  • About VEGA processor: It is a family of indigenous microprocessors designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under MeitY’s Microprocessor Development Programme, based on the open-standard RISC-V architecture.
    • By placing this processor at the centre of the Component Innovation track, NIDAR 2.0 encourages students to build the control systems of Indian drones on Indian-made chips.
• Prizes: It offers a cash prize of over Rs 65 lakh.
  • Winning teams will also receive corporate internships, incubation support and cloud computing credits to help turn their prototypes into commercial products.