MPSTME ASLS advances to the Smart India Hackathon Nationals

We’re MPSTME ASLS, and we’re representing our university at the national level of the Smart India Hackathon.

This started long before a submission form or a stage. We’ve been building a CubeSat platform and an industrial-grade drone with one idea in mind: make advanced systems feel simple, reliable, and within reach. That work helped us win our institute round and qualify for the national Grand Finale, an in-person showdown hosted across nodal centres in India. It’s how SIH is designed: institutes run internal evaluations, nominate their best teams, and those teams move to the national stage. We did exactly that.

The CubeSat is our blueprint for collaboration. Space-grade where it counts. Off-the-shelf where it helps. We’re reducing complexity and cost without lowering the bar on reliability. Everything is open source, so researchers, clubs, and startups can fork it, improve it, and fly with us. This is how we believe space hardware should evolve: transparent, modular, and shared. The drone follows the same philosophy, but with steel in its spine. This is a competitive, industrial solution built to work when the wind picks up, when the dust gets in, when the schedule can’t slip. Rugged. Reliable. No drama. We’re engineering for the job site, not just the demo.

Winning internally matters because it validates the work where it’s seen up close by faculty, mentors, and industry reviewers who can ask the hard questions. From here, the path is clear. The national Grand Finale brings top teams to nodal centres around the country, monitored and evaluated under the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell. It’s the home stretch before outcomes are decided. One stage. Many problem statements. Real stakes.

We’re not done. We’re refining flight stacks, tightening tolerances, and making it easier for contributors to plug in. If you’re a lab, a company, or a team that wants to build with us on-orbit payloads, edge compute, or field deployments we’re ready. Our repositories are open. Our roadmap is public. Bring your use case; we’ll bring the engineering.

To everyone who stood with us, thank you. Mentors who challenged the plan. Reviewers who pressed for data. Peers who stayed late and shipped. This qualification is a shared result, and the next chapter is bigger than any single team.

Nationals, we’re coming.