Mangaluru: Student-piloted aircraft and battling robots took centre stage on the second day of Synergia’26 at Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management (SCEM), Adyar, Friday.The national-level technical and innovation festival drew more than 5,000 students from over 425 institutions for aviation, robotics, coding, artificial intelligence and quizzing events.Aerophilia 2026 opened with an air show inaugurated by Daniel D’Souza, founder of TIF Labs, drawing around 3,000 spectators.SCEM student pilots flew student-built remote-controlled aircraft, raptors, fighter planes and drones through intricate manoeuvres.“Usually, we call outside pilots to fly the huge planes, but this time we have our own pilots who are a part of Team Challengers, a student club run by the students of Sahyadri,” said Sanjana, a final-year student at SCEM.Tanmay, Aerophilia event head and a third-year robotics student at SCEM, said Sky Dive (aeromodelling) and Lift Off (drone racing) attracted over 100 participants from states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.Team Challengers organised hands-on aeromodelling workshops for school and pre-university students, including NCC cadets from Sharada Vidyalaya.“We are conducting an aeromodelling workshop for eighth, ninth, tenth, and PUC students. It is mainly about the basics — how a plane moves, the designs, the simulators, and the RC controllers,” said Sharanya PB, a third-year robotics and automation student and core member of the Aeromodelling Club.In Robo Soccer, student-built bots competed in one-on-one, three-minute matches. “They build the bots from scratch using motors, metal for the chassis, controllers, and electronic speed controllers (ESCs), competing in both wired and wireless setups,” said Hemanth Kiran, a final-year robotics and automation student.The ninth DevHost, organised by the Sahyadri Open Source Community (SOSC), featured the 36-hour DevHack marathon, sponsored by EG India, with masterclasses on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by Adarsh Shetty, software developer at CodeCraft Technologies, and multi-agent architectures by Vasudevan Badiadka, software engineer at Microsoft.The second Sahyadri WhizQuiz Junior 2026 drew 300 students in 100 teams from PU colleges.Vishal Samartha, director of the MBA programme at SCEM, said the competition reached 25 PU colleges and over 1,500 students.
