IIIT-H's Driverless Car for Indian Roads on the Way

HYDERABAD: Years of hardwork by students of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and their mentors is on display in the form of posters and demos at the R&D Showcase - 2016  held in the city on Saturday.

Game changing technologies took centerstage at the two-day event, which consists of a showcase of over 300 select exhibits and demonstration of research projects representing some of IIIT-H’s most recent developments covering diverse domains such as Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, etc.

From an Indianised version of self driven cars to a software that analyses sports video and delivers commentary to website that supplements learning music, researchers put their best ideas forward with their models.

Ever thought that the self-driven cars being developed by tech giants like Google or Apple are out of your reach? Well, the students of IIIT-H in partnership with Uurmi Systems are developing one for Indian users, which are much cheaper and Indianised in nature.

“The sensors that the tech giants are using cost somewhere around $75,000, which is way too high for us. So, we are trying to build driverless cars at a much affordable budget by using cameras, GPS and sensors and a computer. The car will also have the ability to detect potholes and bridges,” Sudeep Fadadu, who is leading the team, said.

“In three to four months, the model car should be ready and we will give a demo to military. Then we will think of making it available for the common people,” he added.

According to Fadadu, the feature can be built in any car and would cost approximately over `2 lakh to install.

The Game Changer

This game developed by students aims at demonstrating all the features of Intel RealSense camera. Omnipotent consists of various levels where user begins by building houses and so on. The game is played using gestures, face expressions and voice commands. It also has the ability to read human emotions, say, if a user smiles, it starts snowing and if he is angry it starts to rain.

“In this game, there will be zombies trying to attack people. By using voice and gestures, they can be killed. The user gets to do both positive and negative actions like scaring the people or blessing them and based on the work done by him, he unlocks powers and new levels,” N R Revanth Reddy, one of the developers, said.