Young entrepreneurs build bots, drones to save lives

There's a sad irony in disaster striking those who are trying to avert them. Pragdish Santosh finds himself in that state now. He's stranded in his house in Chennai, and the drones he built with his friend Nijandan Shanmugavijayan that could have been effective in aerial disaster assessment, are probably floating around in their Mount Road office, like so much else in Chennai today.
Santosh started building drones from his second undergraduate year in aerospace engineering at Anna University, Chennai. He initially started a training company to teach students how to build drones, but after his graduation he realized his skills could actually be used to solve real problems. "The hardware engineering part was easy as we had studied design analysis and manufacturing of airplanes," Santosh says. The challenge was in the software and data processing part.
Santosh and Shanmugavijayan approached the Institute of Remote Sensing, which promptly offered help. And last year, with the help of the students in the training firm, they built their first drone in six months. They also established their company, which they called Aero 360.
For Chennai, Santosh is still hopeful. As soon as the waters recede, he hopes to get his drones to fly and help in the rescue and rehabilitation efforts.
"We have shown demos to the Coastal Security Group in Chennai on how we can provide realtime insights of areas, based on which they can prepare their actions. We have also posted a message on social media asking if NGOs involved in search and rescue operations need our help," he says.
Disaster management is always tough, and in countries like India, where systems and processes are particularly weak, natural disasters can wreak havoc and the effects can last a long time. New technologies are now providing ways to assist disaster management efforts, and a variety of startups have emerged to develop innovative solutions.
Controlling epidemics
Pulkit Gaur's Ahmedabad-based Gridbots makes robots that can work in mines and under water, and perform search and rescue missions. The robots can perform under 50 feet water, carry payloads upto 100 kg, and even remove blockages in sewerage systems.
His customers include the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and oil mining firm ONGC. The company sells around 20 robots every year, each worth around Rs 25 lakh. Some are even exported.
Pratik Khandagale, Tejeshwar Singh Karir and Sanket Chadak's Epimetric attempts to check the spread of infectious diseases by digitizing doctors' logs across a city. The app identifies diseases that may turn into an epidemic by capturing patterns and identifying how the disease has travelled. Epimetric was first used in the Nashik Kumbh Mela last year. "More than 300 doctors used it, and Epimetric reported certain outbreak information to health authorities with accurate insights and was thus able to avoid further spread of the disease," Khandagale says.
The company, selected to the Nasscom 10,000 Startup programme, is working with the Integrated Disease Surveillance Project of the Indian government to track the top five diseases in an area, and provide gender-wise and ethnicity analysis.
Birds' eye view
Some of the biggest action is happening in the space of drones. In June 2013, when a cloudburst over Uttarakhand resulted in floods and landslides that shook the entire mountainous region, three 22-year-old engineers in Mumbai -- Aniket Tatipamula, Neeraj Waghchaure, and Shinil Shekhar -- decided to do their bit to help.Their venture, Airpix, offers aerial photography and drone survey.
“We were in Uttarakhand for a week, and the data that we collected was used by NGOs to reach the areas affected,“ says Shekhar. The company's drones, which have a range of four to seven km, enough to cover an area of 20 sq km, also constructed 3D imaging of the areas for better visualization and analyses.
Drona Aviation, founded last year by IIT Bombay graduates Apurva Godbole, Dinesh Sain, and Prasanna Shevare, has started working with the Mumbai fire department. They are also trying to work with the government to create solutions, using 3D images of areas, for tackling floods and earthquakes if and when they strike. Their drones are even capable of dropping food-aid and emergency first-aid kits at disaster sites.
Using a drone for aerial surveys is seen to be far more feasible than getting surveys or photographs done from a chopper or getting satellite images.Aero360 charges Rs 1,000 for every acre of aerial survey they do, about 10 times cheaper than choppers. But more than price, it is the real-time accuracy and efficiency that make drones the preferred choice.
Struggling with regulations
But most such hardware-based ventures are struggling with old regulations and lack of government support. Gridbots' Gaur says government tenders make onerous demands.
"The government often goes for the cheapest products and we are treated on par with foreign companies. We would like to have some norm relaxations and taxbreaks," he says Ankit Mehta, founder of Idea Forge, which also makes drones and which has received about $2 million from Uday Kotak and others, says that while the potential is global, the funding is insufficient to give them the bandwidth to market and sell internationally."Hardware startups need huge upfront funding," he says.
Quality concerns
The muddy government regulations regarding flying of drones is also an issue. The DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) is still working on guidelines for the civil use of drones. "So we have not been able to operate in full swing, though the government understands the advantages of using drones in cases of disasters," says Santosh of Aero 360.
Former ISRO chairman U R Rao, however, says Indian startups in the space have still not established sufficient credibility. "Many of them have failed to meet our requirements and specifications. Their quality control is not top notch, and fail at real-life tests," he says. That's a message the startups may want to pay attention to.