IIT-Madras students develop drones enabled with AI for disaster management service

Indian Institute of Technology-Madras students have developed an ‘Eye in the Sky - Disaster Management and Humanitarian Aid Services’.

A team from Centre For Innovation (CFI), IIT Madras, is building drones enabled with Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision to develop an end-to-end solution to identify accurate and critical information on people trapped in disaster-hit areas and communicate them to relief task force.

The ‘Eye in the Sky’ Team won the finals of Indian Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP 2.0) University Challenge held at IIT- Bombay recently. They were among ‘Top 18 Innovative Startups’ from all over the nation and will receive ₹10 lakh-worth equity-less funding. The team has also received ‘Microsoft AI For Earth’ Grant given to only 390 projects globally.

The India Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP) 2.0 is a unique tripartite initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, American global defence manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation and Tata Trusts. A total of 843 teams from various universities and start-ups participated of which 40 were shortlisted for the ‘DownSelect’ event at IIT-Bombay.

After experimentation and working with data provided by National Disaster Response Force, the team has identified the technologies and software frameworks to be used. Some of the Advanced and Innovative Technologies that team has worked on as part of this project would include deep learning for highly accurate person detection and low altitude person detection, says a press release from IIT-Madras.