A project leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce road accidents, by primarily providing alerts to drivers as well as help improve road infrastructure from a safety perspective, rolled out in Nagpur is likely to be replicated in other locations, including Hyderabad.
The project, iRASTE (intelligent Solutions for Road Safety through Technology and Engineering), seeks to create a blueprint for the country and is being implemented by a consortium comprising chipmaker Intel, the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), CSIR-Central Road Research Institute and others.
The focus is on three crucial areas — vehicle safety, mobility analysis and road infrastructure safety, top level representatives of the consortium partners said during a virtual media interaction on Monday. While a similar programme was tried out in a few cities elsewhere, what makes the Nagpur project unique is the scale of deployment of AI – about 350 buses are to get the palm-sized device on the dashboard and connected to a camera — and the aim to achieve up to 50% decline in road accidents in two years, they sought to emphasise.
Country Head of Intel India and vice-president, Intel Foundry Services Nivruti Rai said technologies such as AI will play a transformational role in enabling smarter and safer vehicles, roads and drivers. The project aims to re-imagine road safety with the predictive power of AI.Advanced Driving Assistance Systems. The ADAS alerts alongside driver assessments and training can notably improve driver performance. Mobility analysis will continuously monitor dynamic risks of the entire road network to define grey and black spots – areas that are high risk or accident prone. Preventive maintenance of such stretches will avert blackspots before they claim lives, the consortium partners said in a release.
Under the project, Nagpur Municipal Corporation’s fleet of vehicles will be equipped with collision avoidance technology. Sensors will help map the dynamic risk of the entire road network (grey spot map), which in turn can be used by road maintenance agencies to prevent accident-prone zones (black spots). Project iRASTE will conduct detailed studies to recommend engineering fixes for existing black spots and implement an AI-powered system for continuous monitoring of road infrastructure quality.
IIIT-H Director P.J.Narayanan said the Institute through INAI sought to transform academic expertise into population-scale impact.
