Funded Project

List of Funded Projects

  1. New Faculty Initiation Grant (NFIG)

  2. New Faculty Seed Grant (NFSG)

  3. Core Research Grant from Science and Engineering Reserach Board (SERB-CRG)

  4. Center of Excellence for Marine Autonomous Systems (CMAS)

New Faculty Initiation Grant (NFIG)

Funding Agency: IIT Madras

Duration: 2019-2021 (Completed)

Project Summary

As a part of this project, we will be developing a self propelled ship model with a propeller and rudder. The craft will be controlled it through an on-board Raspberry Pi that uses a student smartphone as its sensor suite. The software components of this project will be implemented in Robot Operating System (ROS). This project is mainly targeted towards undergraduate students who will be involved in the design, fabrication, integration and control of the craft. It will provide a hands on experience for students interested in the area of marine robotics.

New Faculty Seed Grant (NFSG)

Funding Agency: IIT Madras

Duration: 2021-2023

Project Summary

As a part of this project, we will be developing another self propelled ship model equipped with a rudder and a propeller. The craft will also be equipped with sensors like IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), GPS, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) Camera. This vehicle will be worked upon by both graduate and undergraduate students (those who have demonstrated excellece in working with the RasPi controlled vehicle). The main objective of this project will be to integrate more complex sensors with a more powerful onboard computer running ROS and to achieve obstacle detection and avoidance using artificial intelligence (AI) based methods.

Core Research Grant

Funding Agency: SERB

Duration: 2021-2024

Project Summary

This project has both computational and experimental parts to it. In the first part of the project we will be developing various control algorithms - both traditional methods like PID, LQR, MPS, SMC and also modern methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) - to achieve path following and trajectory tracking. The experimental component of the work will involve implementing these developed algorithms to a scaled free running ship models equipped with various sensors.The focus of the project is to see which of the AI based methods like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short term memory (LSTM) networks and reinforcement learning (RL) lead to a better performance and understand why. This work is mainly targeted towards graduate students and a select undergraduate students who have demonstrated excellence with the NFIG and NFSG projects.

Center of Excellence for Marine Autonomous Systems (CMAS)

Funding Agency: Ministry of Education

Duration: 2021-2023

Project Summary

This project aims to develop further beyond the above 3 projects. Here the goal is to develop artificial intelligence (AI) based control algorithms for cooperative interaction with multiple vessels while obeying the navigational rules of the waterway. We will be deploying these algorithms on multiple vehicles and test them at the IIT Madras lake. This project will also look into navigation of multiple vessels autonomously through restricted waterways. Both graduate and undergradute students who have demonstrated excellence in working with previous projects will be involved into this project.