Airguardian

AirGuardian: A multi utility tool.

Inspiration

Primarily it was those times when while going to tuition I used to encounter heaps of garbage at the great landfill beside the marine drive. The worst part about it was that it was a breeding ground for insects and bugs that carry vector-borne diseases. I felt an urge deep within to make my city cleaner and my interest in robotics and A.I. can make it possible.

What it does

Air Guardian speaks about itself. It is a guardian to our city which scans large areas and detects waste from different illegal landfills. After scanning, it recycles the garbage by converting the garbage, particularly plastic into 3d printable filaments and converting other garbage to paper to sell them again at a fair price. The scanning is done every weekend while there's another job that Air Guardian does. Air Guardian does night surveillance. It helps track suspicious activity and criminal behavior in places that are remote and alert the police with the face Ids of the criminals at large.

How we built it

Currently, we just have prepared a prototype using sun board(for the UAV) and tuned it with raspberry pi which would help it detect real-time garbage in landfills at a much faster pace.

Challenges we ran into

Making and designing a UAV is much more complex than doing the same for a drone as you have to correctly define its aerodynamical body and tenderly connect all its circuits. That was the first hurdle. The next step was to attack a camera to a precise point that will not tamper with the aerodynamics of the UAV. The main hurdle was to choose the model of the camera that would be compact and sturdy and effective enough to detect garbage in real-time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After a lot of trial and error, we were successful in testing it out with regard to garbage detection. That's one step closer to the intended goal. The next step is to empower the UAV with programming to detect criminal activities. We have trained it on producing 1lac images which again makes it very robust and effective. As it operates over time, it will become more efficient.

What we learned

We first wanted to start with drones but their bulky body and complex mechanisms require more energy which made them less efficient. The UAV that we developed uses one motor and if we are provided with initial funding we can make this AirGuardian loaded with sensors. I have learned that something is better than nothing and we should at least try towards solving the problems which we generally ignore.

What's next for Air Guardian

The plastic can be recycled and converted into a 3-D printer filament which can be sold at a higher cost. This model will fuel the sustainability of the project. This will be a non-profit organization. We can establish a symbiosis relationship between the locals of my city and Airguardain. People from the city will provide us with useful recyclable materials and we in turn make their city cleaner, greener and safer. At last, I would like to say that this model is so efficient that it can be used not only in our city but anywhere in the world.