Vinsers’ Disaster-response Drone project continues to conquer international STEM competition

At the end of November, Bui Khanh Minh – a Vinschool student specializing in STEM research from the GATE center for gifted students – won First Prize in the upper secondary category in the Pratt and Whitney Singapore Invention Convention (PWSIC) with "The Servator", a disaster search and rescue drone.

PWSIC is a STEM competition for students aged 5-19 from countries such as Singapore, Japan, Thailand, China, and Vietnam to showcase their inventions and learn new scientific knowledge. The competition is also an opportunity for participants to discuss with expert researchers about their inventions and receive feedback for improvements.

“The Servator” project was developed by Khanh Minh and other GATE students to assist the rescue of flood victims in Vietnam. The Servator drone is equipped with a camera to search and identify people swept away by floods and send information to a server so that victims can be rescued in time. Previously, in May 2022, “The Servator” also entered the Top 10 of the best global interdisciplinary projects at the StarT International Competition.

Khanh Minh shared: “I received many questions and recommendations from the judges, who are all STEM experts. This really motivated me to continue researching and expanding the project. During the competition, I also had the chance to observe and learn about rescue technology from other countries and draw experience to improve my product. In the near future, we will continue working on coding our machine learning, a system that transmits images and data from the camera to the server. Then, we plan to expand the project by building drones that deliver first-aid packages, which will help increase the efficiency of rescue work and properly distribute resources in severe cases.”

More information about the Pratt & Whitney Invention Convention is available here.