The impact of AI on our daily lives is manifold. Technological innovations are disrupting various industries too, from education and healthcare to manufacturing and transportation, to name a few. In the field of transportation, self-driving cars have particularly gripped everyone’s imagination. But the mobility ecosystem has expanded over the last few years to go beyond autonomous navigation. The i-Hub-Data centre located on IIITH campus has been actively involved in various applications that are multi-disciplinary in nature for mobility-based problems. One of them concerns detecting abnormal traffic patterns and rule violations on Indian roads.

At the recently concluded International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) that was held in Abu Dhabi, IIITH’s Robotics Research Centre made a splash with a presentation of 6 research papers. Since 1988, IROS, one of the largest and most important robotics research conference in the world, has been providing a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas about the latest advances in intelligent robots and smart machines. The theme of IROS 2024 was “Robotics for Sustainable Development“ with a focus on highlighting the role of robotics in achieving sustainability goals.

IIITH’s Self Driving Car is an electric vehicle that performs point to point Autonomous Driving with collision avoidance capabilities over a wide area. Equipped with 3D LIDAR, Depth Cameras, GPS systems and AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference System which essentially means sensors on three axes to estimate it’s orientation in space), the car can also accept Open Set Natural Language commands and follow those commands to reach a desired destination. SLAM-based point cloud mapping is used to map the campus environment and a LIDAR-guided real-time state estimation allows for localization while driving.