TDB Signs Rs 151 Crore RDI Deal With ideaForge for YETI UAV

The Technology Development Board (TDB), which works under the Department of Science and Technology, has signed an agreement with ideaForge Technology Limited of Mumbai, Maharashtra, for financial support of Rs 151 crore drawn from the Research Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund. The money goes to building YETI, a heavy-lift, long-range autonomous aerial logistics vehicle.

What the agreement covers

The whole project is costed at Rs 302 crore, so the board's share arrives as debt financing against roughly half of it. The purpose is to carry the technology from Technology Readiness Level (TRL)-4 up to TRL-9, which is the stage at which a system is proven in actual operations. Engineering, integration, testing and validation needed for that climb are what the support pays for, subject to technical, safety and regulatory clearances.

What YETI is designed to do

YETI is an autonomous vertical take-off and landing fixed-wing hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle, written as VTOL-FW UAV. The combination matters: it rises and lands straight up like a rotorcraft, yet keeps a fixed wing for the long cruise, which is how it is meant to move heavy loads over distance in places where roads are poor or weather closes in.

The technology inside

• Distributed and redundant propulsion and power architecture, for better fault tolerance
• Navigation that works even where satellite signals are denied
• A communication link reaching up to 200 km, plus swarm operation
• Containerised transport, so the vehicle can be shifted and set up quickly
• Weather-resistant build for high-altitude, desert and marine conditions

Why it matters

The project sits in the deep technology sector, with intelligent systems and robotics as its sub-sector. TDB Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Pathak said indigenous heavy-lift aerial platforms can improve access to remote and hard-to-reach places, and that the RDI Fund is meant for technology-heavy projects that need sustained money to move from advanced development towards deployment. For aspirants the story is a clean example of the government funding an Indian deep-tech firm to take a defence-and-logistics platform all the way to field use.