Kanad Robotics
We build machines that move the world through the air.
A robotics research lab in Palanpur, Gujarat.
कणाद Kaṇāda
- परमाणु paramāṇu one particle, indivisible
- द्व्यणुक dvyaṇuka two paired
- त्र्यणुक tryaṇuka three dyads — the smallest perceptible unit
कणाद The name
More than two thousand years ago, a thinker in India asked a simple question. If you keep dividing matter, where does it stop?
His answer was the paramāṇu: a particle that cannot be divided any further.
Tradition says he lived on stray grains gathered from harvested fields, and that is how he got his name. Kaṇa means grain, or particle. Kaṇāda.
His Vaiśeṣika Sūtra holds one of the earliest known theories of the atom. His school described how paramāṇus pair into a dyad, and how dyads join into the smallest thing an eye can see.
Tradition also places his birth on the Gujarat coast, a few hundred kilometres from where we build.
We took his name because our work is his, run in the other direction. He reasoned matter down to its last indivisible part. We assemble upward from it: atoms into alloys, alloys into airframes, airframes into a new layer of transport.
Pairing into dyads and triads is described by the Vaiśeṣika school; later commentators formalised it.
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त्र्यणुक the triad
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a lattice
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carbon tube, section
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an arm
First, earn the sky.
Our first aircraft is deliberately conventional: a multirotor, designed and assembled by us in Palanpur. The architecture is proven. What we’re proving is everything around it: payload, endurance, reliability, autonomy, and the discipline to fly the same mission a thousand times without surprises.
It’s being built to one hard requirement: 5 kg of payload.
Status Prototype and research
- 1 Frame carbon tube and plate, assembled in-house
- 2 Motors four, fixed pitch
- 3 Propellers sized for payload, not for speed
- 4 Flight controller autonomy and failsafe logic
- 5 Battery endurance under test
- 6 Payload bay designed around 5 kg
- Drawing
- Multirotor, first aircraft
- View
- Exploded isometric
- Status
- Prototype and research
Every road is a line.
A city moves on lines drawn across a surface. Each line has a width, and the width is fixed. Add vehicles and the line fills. Widen it, and it fills again. Every new path costs land, money and years.
On the ground, every journey is restricted to the paths someone already built, at the width someone already chose.
- 120 m northbound
- 90 m eastbound
- 60 m local
- 0 m the surface
The air above the same city is a volume.
No painted lanes. No width limit. Paths can stack by altitude, cross without meeting, and run straight.
On a grid, the average trip is about 27% longer than the straight line. That’s before a single traffic signal. In the air, the straight line is available.
The road can be widened one more time. Or the load can leave it.
Ground route against air route
Drag the destination. Arrow keys move it; hold Shift for larger steps.
one square = 250 m
- Ground route
- — km
- Air route
- — km
- Ground ÷ air
- —
Averaged over all directions, a route confined to a square grid is 4/π ≈ 1.27 times the straight-line distance. That is geometry, not traffic. Real road networks add further detours, and congestion on top of those.
5 kg. 5 km. Out and back. On its own.
The first mission is deliberately narrow: lift a 5 kg load, fly it 2.5 km, return, and do it autonomously and repeatably. Narrow missions are how hard machines become reliable machines.
We’ll productionise and commercialise this first system as soon as it’s proven.
Planned mission profile. Not a record of a flight.
- Flown
- 0.00 km
- Payload
- 5.0 kg
- Leg
- outbound
Each rung is a different machine.
5 kg covers medicine, spare parts, samples and documents. 100 kg covers real freight. After that come people.
Physics doesn’t scale politely. For a hovering rotor of fixed size, power grows faster than load: twenty times the thrust needs roughly ninety times the power. So the 100 kg machine won’t be a 5 kg drone scaled up. It has to be rethought.
Hover power against thrust
- Thrust
- 1.0×
- Power
- 1.0×
Ideal hover power grows with thrust to the power 1.5, for a fixed rotor area. From momentum theory.
Then we start over.
Once payload is earned, every assumption in today’s drone gets reopened: wings, rotors, structure, propulsion. We’re not trying to make a better quadcopter. We want to find out what a flying machine should look like when it’s designed from physics instead of from habit.
- Questions on the sheet right now
- 1Should lift and cruise come from different surfaces?
- 2Can the structure be a single lattice, grown as one part instead of assembled from tubes and plates?
- 3How quiet can a rotor be made before it stops being a rotor?
- 4What propulsion makes sense when the energy source changes?
- Drawing
- Airframe study, second generation
- Status
- Open. Nothing here is designed yet.
- Class
- Concept. Not a product.
- Sheet
- 1 of 1
The sky ahead
A
A morning in Banaskantha
A box of medicine leaves Palanpur before sunrise and reaches a village in the Aravalli foothills before the road would have woken up.
Imagined. Drawn over a real place. · [PLACEHOLDER: north Gujarat landscape at dawn — Aravalli foothills, fields]
B
The layered city
Over Ahmedabad, freight moves in layers. Each layer has its own direction and speed. Nothing waits at a signal, because there are no signals.
Imagined. Drawn over a real place. · [PLACEHOLDER: Ahmedabad from above]
C
The people layer
Eventually, the same sky carries people: quiet, autonomous, scheduled. A commute measured in minutes and in a straight line.
Imagined. Drawn over a real place. · [PLACEHOLDER: city street level, looking up]
D
Infrastructure, honestly
The air needs rules, landing points and traffic management. That is infrastructure too, but it’s mostly software and pads, not hundreds of kilometres of concrete.
- 1 Corridors altitude bands with direction and speed, defined in software
- 2 Landing points a pad and a power connection
- 3 Traffic management separation, sequencing, weather, failure handling
- 4 Rules who may fly what, where, and over whom
We grew up watching this future in films. It doesn’t arrive on its own. It has to be engineered, one part at a time.
We started in Palanpur.
A research lab that ships.
Kanad Robotics designs and assembles its machines in Palanpur, Gujarat. We do research to find the right machine, then we put it into production as fast as it’s ready.
We also care about what surrounds us. India should design frontier machines, not only assemble them, and that takes people who have built hard things. So we’re building those people too.
24.17° N, 72.43° E પાલનપુર, ગુજરાત Palanpur, Gujarat
Who builds it
- Khetesh Akoliya
- Founder
- Product and design. Also founder of Cosmic Q and the Edutor App, and runs AIRRE Club.
- Prince Joshi
- Hardware lead
- Co-founder. The airframe and the electronics.
[PLACEHOLDER: further team names and roles]
AIRRE Club
Kanad is part of AIRRE Club, founded by Khetesh Akoliya to find young people early and put them to work on frontier technology.
[PLACEHOLDER: one or two more lines on AIRRE Club — what it runs, who it is for]
[PLACEHOLDER: what AIRRE stands for, if it is an acronym]
[PLACEHOLDER: AIRRE Club link]
File a flight plan
Two headings. Pick the one that fits, and tell us where you are going.
- Status
- Plan received
- Filed
- —
- Reference
- —
We reply by email.