Successful Drone Operation

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Center of the Advanced College of Engineering and Management (ACEM) successfully operated a drone above the allocated rivers of Kathmandu, pioneering new heights in research, technology and teamwork. It was carried out in collaboration with Airlift Technology. Er. Suraj Paudel represented the Airlift team; he is also a former student of ACEM.

The AI Research Center is currently working on a research project entitled ‘Unveiling Waste and its Ripple Effect: Analyzing the Impact of Waste’. This research project is awarded by the NCE Research Grant, an academic grant provided by the National College of Engineering (NCE), Lalitpur, Nepal. This project is led by Dr. Bipun Man Pati, D.Eng, as a ‘principal investigator’ while Er. Ukesh Thapa and Mr. Bishnu Khadka are respective ‘co-investigators’ of the project. 

The primary objective of this ‘drone operation’ is to collect the images of waste in two rivers namely Bagmati and Bishnumati. In order to carry it out, a drone was operated over these rivers. It aims to study waste as a whole using image segmentation and object detection in order to find out the individual pieces of waste in the photographs and ultimately draw lines around areas where there's a lot of waste using AI.