iRASTE project aims reducing road accidents, finding factors responsible: Intel India head

The recently launched 'iRASTE' project aims to help reduce road accidents as well as understand the factors responsible for these events and in engineering solutions to mitigate them, Intel India head Nivruti Rai said on Monday.

Union minister Nitin Gadkari had on Saturday launched 'iRASTE', an Artificial Intelligence-powered project, on a pilot basis in Nagpur in Maharashtra with the aim of reducing accidents by 50 per cent in Vidarbha's biggest city.

iRASTE is an acronym for Intelligent Solutions for Road Safety through Technology and Engineering.

The project -- which is a collaborative effort between the government, Intel, INAI, IIIT-Hyderabad, CSIR-CRRI (Central Road Research Institute), Mahindra & Mahindra and Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) -- will focus on vehicle safety, mobility analysis and road infrastructure safety to move towards a 'Vision Zero' accident scenario.

"We've come together and leveraged AI technology and are working towards creating a solution, which addresses three problems. One, reduce collision by as much as 50 per cent by 2025, Two, not only look at collision avoidance to save lives of people but also into the factors that cause this accident to happen," Nivruti Rai, Country Head at Intel India and Vice President, Intel Foundry Services said in a briefing.

She added that one of the factors is infrastructure, and the project will see areas being marked as white, grey and black.

"...it (project) looks at what is called the black zone, whether an accident has already happened, gray zone where accident could happen. So builds a map of grays, blacks and white zones that can then lead to step three - enable (for the problem) to be worked on, a lot of engineering that can be done on why is this area a gray zone, what can be done, is there a learning," she explained.

Rai added that the industry, academia and government have come together to address this problem of road accidents.

Under the iRASTE project, vehicles belonging to Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) will be equipped with collision avoidance technology that can reduce accidents and near misses, while sensors will help map the dynamic risk of the entire road network, which can be used by agencies to prevent and rectify accident-prone zones, also called black spots.

The use of AI to map accident spots will also help collect data on road surface condition, signage, marking, signal details, type of vehicles, models in use and utility assets.

IITH Director Professor PJ Narayan said the work on the project has already started and about 30-odd vehicles have already been fitted with sensors.

He added that in the next two years, there will be more such projects as there is interest from other state governments as well, including from Telangana government.

Satish Chandra, Director at CSIR-CRRI, said India has a high fatality rate at about 1.48 lakh annually.

He added that while it is difficult to bring accidents to zero but these efforts can help bring out fatality rates.

"I'm very hopeful that we will be able to achieve 50 per cent target...once we are successful, we will be able to emulate this model for other cities also, and maybe in next three to five years we will have more number of cities included with this project iRASTE," he said.

Chandra added that the plan is to equip up to 350 buses as part of the project.