An all-women team and its solution for women’s security walked away with top honours at the finals of ‘Hackadrone 2018’, the country’s first UAV hackathon, here on Friday.
The solution, developed by Team Drone Force comprising Pragnya Kondrakunta, an engineering student from the city and two of her assistant professors Fatima and Swapna Bhandari, comes into play as soon as victim sends an alert from a mobile app.
The solution sends real-time alerts to the control station and the victim’s guardians. The control station would then deploy a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) to the location and start beaming images thereby promoting the response.
A cash prize of ₹3 lakh was given to the winners. Hackadrone 2018 was open to developers, start-ups, tech. students and independent software programmers aspiring to develop innovative commercial and industrial solutions using the latest drone technology.
IT firm Cyient in association with DJI, a leader in developing and manufacturing drone and camera technology, organised the event. Microsoft and Telangana Government were associated with the hackathon. A total of 4,000 individual entries were received and subsequently 700 teams went through the elimination process. Seven teams made it to the final round.
Information Technology Minister K.T. Rama Rao handing over prizes to the winners, said drone technology can play a major role in various areas, especially urban development and mining.
Noting that rapid urbanisation is causing great deterioration in the infrastructure, he highlighted the significance of planned urban development. “Drone technology can play a huge role,” Mr. Rao said.
Some of the areas in which drones can be of immense help were in the project to rejuvenate the Musi river, to monitor mining activities and even assess building violations without being intrusive.
Where emerging technologies offer a plethora of solutions they also pose challenges from a government perspective, he said, calling for government and industry to work together to ensure misuse of the technology is not there.
Team FLY Ranger, with IT professionals from Bengaluru Akshit Mahajan, Pramod Kumar and Shubham Gupta as members, emerged runners-up for the prototype it had developed for warehouse and order-fulfillment centre management with no GPS mapping.
The system deploys UAVs to scan product barcodes and uses stereo cameras to map the area for the distance between a drone and other surface or objects. The team got ₹1 lakh cash prize.
Team Quidich, comprising tech. professionals from a Mumbai start-up, got a special mention for its solution to promote women’s security. Information Technology Secretary Jayesh Ranjan said Telangana is one of the few States to have a policy on drones and provided incentives for those manufacturing the devices and undertaking R&D.
