Blog

Autonomous coordinated navigation of drones

The broad objective of the project is to achieve autonomous navigation of multiple drones. There are several important problems that need to be answered before we could achieve this objective. We would like to study these questions in the context of Smart Cities, to enable applications such as delivery of essential supplies like medicines/organs etc. across the city.

Our long-term goals are: (1) Design of drones which can cover city wide areas, (2) suggest infrastructure which could potentially be used in a city for drones, and (3) autonomous navigation strategies for multiple drones.

The goals for the first project year are: (1) Creating an infrastructure for drones, (2) designing of drones, (3) autonomous navigation of a single drone with GPS, and (4) state perception using computer vision for drones.

Smart City test bed

The Indian Government has identified Smart Cities as a priority area for development in the coming years. ICT will play a key role in supporting smart city solutions and more specifically, IoT technologies will be a key enabler for providing the “smarts”. The requirements from citizens in cities is diverse and cuts across many different verticals like transportation, water management, solid waste management, smart parking etc. Typically, each vertical will be addressed by a different vendor, who will provide an end-to-end solution. However it has been recognized of late, that a better approach might be to have a horizontal approach where in sensors, and other data are made available across different silos – in order to foster new, cost effective solutions to various city related problems and citizen needs. A simple example is that of a camera sensor which can aid in not only in surveillance but also in crowd management, smart parking, transit operations management etc. applications. Hence there is a need to develop smart city ICT/IoT framework as a generic platform that will support a diverse set of applications.

A smart manufacturing test bed for biomedical devices

The project proposes to develop a smart factory test bed for research in the area of smart manufacturing at the systems engineering level, for biomedical device applications. The test bed will allow collection of real-time data from all five elements of a factory (people, part, tools, processes, and environment) mainly for the following factory functions: inspection, assembly, rework, and testing.

Development of chemotactic robots

This project focuses on diarrheal diseases, which cause nearly 3,00,000 infant and child mortality in India. So far, animal models have been developed to understand the functioning of the receptor for the bacterial toxin involved in the disease. What has become apparent from these studies is that in vitro models and computational models not only help understand the disease processes and make way for testing new drugs and therapies. There are open questions such as stochasticity in the response of the gut-epithelial cells to bacterial toxins and the effect of peristalsis on the gut-epithelium. These two aspects prompted a bioCPS approach that this project will pursue.

A BioCPS approach to understand and control gut-biology (CyberGut)

Diarrheal diseases cause nearly 3,00,000 infant and child mortality in India. The Gut plays an important role in diseases as disparate as diabetes and autism. To augment animal models for the gut-epithelium with engineered in-vitro models using gut-on-a-chip and active scaffold platforms and conduct studies to sense, effect, and control cellular responses.