Along Punjab’s border, small drones have become a recurring worry — cheap, quiet and hard to stop with the tools built for bigger threats. A missile costs hundreds of times more than the drone it is meant to destroy, jamming fails the moment a drone flies on its own navigation, and guns need a clear line of sight. So three young engineers from Lovely Professional University decided to build the answer in the form of a faster drone — one that catches the slower one. That is the idea behind ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions, a Punjab startup building a high-speed interceptor drone to hunt hostile UAVs in the air.
ASTRA’s hexacopter surveillance platform, one of the company’s made-in-India UAVs. (Image: ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions)
A faster drone for a faster threat
ASTRA’s flagship is its Counter-UAS interceptor drone, a high-speed platform the company says is designed to detect, pursue and intercept hostile unmanned aircraft before they reach sensitive installations or cross the border. Built for rapid acceleration, high manoeuvrability and autonomous target engagement, the interceptor is meant to close the distance fast and neutralise the threat in the air — the kind of mission where every second matters and where the answer has to be as agile as the threat itself.
The company is building the interceptor as part of a layered approach to aerial defence, pairing it with surveillance drones that watch the skies and with fibre-optic communication drones designed to keep flying securely in electronic warfare environments, where conventional radio-frequency links may be vulnerable. It is a full-stack way of thinking about the problem: see the threat, stay connected through the jamming, and send up something faster to deal with it.
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ASTRA’s high-speed interceptor drone. (Video: ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions)
From a robotics club to a defence startup
ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions was founded in January 2026 by three Lovely Professional University alumni — Siddharth Kushwaha, Anirban Sarkar and Sarthak Gaira — who first learned to build and fly drones together in the university’s Renovation Tech Robotics and Aeromodelling (RTRA) Club. What began as a student passion for aeromodelling, workshops and national-level competitions became a serious engineering pursuit, and then a company.
In April 2026 the startup was incubated at the Technology Business Incubator Foundation at IIT Ropar, giving the young team access to research infrastructure, mentoring and technical expertise as it moved from prototypes towards mission-ready platforms. The company is based at IIT Ropar in Rupnagar, Punjab — a state that sits on a border where small drones have become a recurring concern, and where the problem ASTRA is solving is close to home.
The founders say their work with the Indian Army’s Corps of Electronics and Mechanical Engineers, including contributions during Operation Sindoor, shaped how they build. Defence systems, they learned, cannot be designed only around specifications on paper: they have to be reliable, practical, maintainable and modular, and able to operate in demanding conditions. That lesson runs through ASTRA’s product philosophy — field-oriented, modular and mission-specific UAV systems, engineered around the operational problem first.
One of ASTRA’s FPV platforms. (Image: ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions)
More than one drone
Beyond the interceptor, ASTRA’s portfolio spans FPV drones for tactical operations, surveillance drones for intelligence and reconnaissance, vertical take-off and landing platforms for long-endurance missions, training UAVs and customised platforms built for specific missions. In July 2026 the company said it was entering the loitering munition segment with an indigenous strike drone, moving from defensive systems to offensive ones within a year of founding.
The longer-term direction is autonomy: integrating robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous decision-making so the platforms can carry out increasingly complex missions with less human input. For now the focus is on getting the fundamentals right — indigenous engineering, secure communications and hardware that can be trusted in the field.
ASTRA’s compact FPV drone. (Image: ASTRA Drones and Robotics Solutions)
A national stage
In November 2026, ASTRA was selected to showcase its drone technologies at ESTIC 2026, the Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For a company founded by three students barely a year earlier, sharing a stage with India’s leading scientists, researchers and deep-tech startups was a measure of how far the team has come — and of how seriously the country is now taking the small, fast, home-grown machines that will guard its skies.
ASTRA is still early in its journey, but the direction is clear: drones designed in India, for Indian conditions, built to catch the threats that nothing else can catch. From a university robotics club in Punjab to a national innovation conclave in New Delhi, these three engineers are building the machines that will keep watch over the border — and they are only getting started.
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