Eco-Pilot

Avoiding birds and whales to save animal lives and company money.

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Inspiration

We are all part of the Del Mar robotics team, and recently we were lucky enough to go to an aerospace company. It was there we found out that birds hitting planes was a problem in the industry. We also found out that there was an issue with boats hitting whales as neither of these vehicles can stop on the dot or turn suddenly. Upon doing more research we discovered that only migrating birds fly at the same altitudes as planes, therefore if you route these planes away from migration paths you don't run into the same issues. We also discovered the real importance of this problem on occasion a bird hitting the plane in the wrong spot can cause a crash! We knew we could make preventive measures against this which is why we started Bio pilot.

What it does

Eco pilot uses AI to predict where migratory birds, and whales are that time of year and routes planes, and boats around where these animals are predicted to be.

How we built it

We trained the AI models on the AMD GPU's provided to us. We then made an API using these models which connects to a express js app which provides a user interface. We also have a desktop version using electron.

Challenges we ran into

We tried several different kinds of ML models, everything from NN to XGBoost, and after tests to evaluate their effectiveness we settled on a KNN. Miscommunication was another issue it became a problem because it was not uncommon for two of us too accidentally be editing the same file. As time went on we got significantly better at communicating what we were doing with each other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us put an AI model trained from scratch out into a real application. We leveled up our UI and UX game a lot, and we really pushed ourselves. We gave ourselves what felt like an impossible task, but through lots of work and the distribution of that work we managed to create a finished and even polished product.

What we learned

None of us have ever trained an AI model from scratch maybe fine-tuning, but this was new, only one of us used three js in the past. We all learned so much and it seems like forever ago that we were struggling to access the AMD GPU suite.

What's next for Eco-Pilot

Eco-Pilots next move may be obvious but it is too add more species of birds and whales. We also plan on adding a priority feature in the future, so that endangered birds and whales are avoided more than non-endangered birds.

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