iRASTE Project: AI to make roads in India safer to drive

What is the News?

The project ‘Intelligent Solutions for Road Safety through Technology and Engineering’ (iRASTE) is being implemented in Nagpur.

What is the iRASTE Project?

This is a unique AI approach that uses the predictive power of AI to identify risks on the road, and a collision alert system to communicate timely alerts to drivers, to make several improvements related to road safety.

Objective: To significantly reduce road accidents.

Implemented by: I-Hub Foundation, IIIT Hyderabad, a Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) along with INAI (Applied AI Research Institute).

The project will

-Identify potential accident-causing scenarios while driving a vehicle and alert drivers about the same with the help of the Advance Driver Assistance System (ADAS).

-Identify ‘greyspots’, i.e., by data analysis and mobility analysis by continuously monitoring dynamic risks on the entire road network.

Note: Greyspots are locations on roads, which left unaddressed could become blackspots (locations with fatal accidents).

-Conducts continuous monitoring of roads and designs engineering fixes to correct existing road blackspots for preventive maintenance and improved road infrastructure.

What are the unique initiatives under the iRASTE Project?

AI and technology are being applied to create practical solutions, as a blueprint, for Indian conditions. These include 1) Used first of its kind India Driving Dataset (IDD). It is a dataset for road scene understanding in unstructured environments captured from Indian roads, 2) Open World Object Detection on Road Scenes (ORDER) dataset: It is developed under IDD. This could be used by autonomous navigation systems in Indian driving conditions for localization and classification of the objects in a road scene,

3) LaneRoadNet (LRNet): It has been designed to address problems of Indian roads, which have several obstacles, occluded lane markings, broken dividers, cracks, potholes, etc. 4) Mobility Car Data Platform (MCDP): It has been designed with several sensors – cameras, LIDARs, for anyone to capture or process data on the car that can help researchers and start-ups in India test their automotive algorithms and approaches in navigation and research on Indian roads.

Source: The post is based on the article “AI to make roads in India safer to drive” published in PIB on 24th May 2022.