IIT-H team wheels out driverless tech, over 10,000 passengers already onboard

The autonomous driving system is already being used for ferrying students within campus without any accidents, the project is now being readied for industry use with enhanced safety features.

Hyderabad: Aiming to develop India-specific smart mobility solutions, a team from IIT Hyderabad has come up with a technology for driverless vehicles to navigate through the institute's campus.

The AI based concept has been created by the Technology Innovation Hub on Autonomous Navigation, or TiHAN in IIT Hyderabad.

"We are exploring autonomous navigation technology, specific to Indian scenario in both aerial and ground vehicles. In ground vehicles, we are looking at how the vehicle can be driven in the Indian scenario and how to drive keeping in view the limitations and challenges (related to) infrastructure," Santhosh Reddy, Hub Executive Officer, told PTI on Sunday.

An autonomous (driverless) vehicle, developed by the team, has been running in the institute's campus since the last one and a half years on a normal road where the students and others travel and there have been no accidents till date, he said.

He said more than 10,000 passengers have already travelled in the vehicle and that the feedback from them has been good.

The vehicle is not used on public roads at present.

The technology is viewed as suitable for deployment in locations such as airports, warehouses and large educational or industrial campuses.

The 'autonomous navigation stack' can operate in any climatic conditions and any vehicle, from electric to even IC (Internal Combustion) engine vehicle. It can be converted into autonomous vehicle, Reddy told PTI Videos.

At present, a driver travels in the vehicle as a precautionary measure but he would not interfere with the vehicle's movement.

He monitors the vehicle and reports any issues in its functioning to the team, Reddy said.

The team, when it started working on the project, just wanted to go step by step without aiming for operating the vehicle either in a controlled environment (like in the campus of an educational institute) or for commercial use.

The first challenge was to set up the vehicle which can drive by itself. Later on, the team kept on adding features and safety enhancements, aiming to improve the vehicle's efficiency, he said.

Asked about the current status of the technology or the 'stack', he said efforts were on to improve the safety features and to eliminate the precautionary deployment of the driver.

The technology developed by them can be fine-tuned according to the vehicle size and other parameters, he said.

The autonomous vehicle was demonstrated at some other locations as well, Reddy added.

On plans to scale up the project, he said the plan is to enhance the features and meet the industry requirements.

Asked if there are plans to introduce the technology for commercial launch of autonomous vehicles in the future, he said the team would like to take it upwith support of any industry partners.