A GPS-enabled, remote controlled farming tractor has won the Intel India Embedded Challenge Award for 2010, an initiative by the chip giant, to recognize and award outstanding innovative ideas from Indian engineering graduates and technical professionals in the embedded space.
“Tractrobot” is a system that can be used to substitute human controlled agricultural operations into an autonomous tractor through cutting edge technologies like GPS, GIS and remote video monitoring. The solution has been implemented using an Intel Atom processor and an ALTERA ARRIA FPGA, connected with PCI Express. It provide user friendly GUI to control the tractor and is a hands-free steering system for straight-line/user defined operations. It's ideal for tillage, seedbed preparation spraying, and seeding operations. The remote console unit can be used to steer the tractor through a joystick with video monitoring system using Wi-Fi. Sanjay Bansal and team from Delhi, received the Grand prize of Rs 10 lakhs.
In the students category, Avinash Siravuru and team (Speed Detector) from Vellore Institute of Technology, the 1st runners up of the contest received Rs100,000,followed by Satyajeet Shinde (Smart Braille Reader), Army School of Technology Pune and Arnold Pereira (Automobile Environ System) and team from Mumbai, the 2nd runners up who got Rs50,000 and Rs25000 respectively. In the professional category, “Cloud Book” & “Tabloid” were recognized for the special awards.
The contest received entries from 2170 participants. Intel short listed 455 teams.The expert panel then short listed 36 team(105 participants) submissions for the prototype phase of the contest. In the prototype phase, each short listed team worked on the Intel® Atom™ Processor kits for prototyping their innovative ideas. Winners of the contest will be eligible for a direct entry to participate in the India Innovation Pioneers Challenge – a technology entrepreneurship contest jointly conducted by Intel, Department of Science & Technology and Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.
SPEED DETECTOR – 1st Runners up
A standalone embedded system consisting of a high speed video camera and a vision processing system which constantly monitors the speed of the vehicles and also captures the images of the violators. The system consists of a 5.7” AT4 Four Wire Resistive Touch Screen Module (for input/output), KEMG-2132(Intel Atom N270 + Intel 945GSE/ICH7-M) board, USB High Speed Camera and Soliton High Speed Camera. The video received from the camera is fragmented into images and then the algorithms such as plane extraction, real world calibration and edge detection are performed on the image to measure speed and upon detecting a violation a stamp is applied on the violator with the speed mentioned. License plate recognition can also ne be performed. A database of the violators is maintained for future reference/action. Since it’s a vision based system, it can be scaled to detect other traffic violations as well.
Automobile Environ System(AES)- 2ND RUNNERS UP The Automobile Environ System (i.e. AES) is a system conceived to bring comprehensive environment monitoring features to today’s cars.
The primary features include a live mileage display, switching off idle engines, powering down the air conditioner and dimming the headlights in high traffic conditions. Secondly, the AES will include cameras, which will be of help in monitoring extra-vehicular proximity, and also in parking. These same cameras will contribute data to an in-built “black box”, which will help investigators and insurance companies determine the exact details in the event of an accident. A GPS module will be used in conjunction with Google Maps and Google Earth to provide navigational facilities.
SMART BRAILLE READER- 2ND RUNNERS UP A low cost, low maintenance Braille reader, can read a Text file directly through a pen drive and display the words one by one onto the Braille display. The Braille display consists of a couple of stepper motors, each of which rotates a wheel that has the Braille characters embossed on its rim. In addition to that, a USB Bluetooth module connected to the device can enable many devices to be networked and thus transfer information via a wireless link.
For more details of the contest : http://inteliec.redbaron.in/about_intel_iec.html
Aug 1 2010