IIT Mandi researchers showcase low-cost landslide monitoring & early warning system
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R&D innovation fair IInvenTiv-2024 held at IIT Hyderabad
The Newz Radar
Mandi: IIT Mandi researchers showcased a low-cost landslide monitoring and early warning system at the second edition of the Ministry of Education’s flagship R&D Innovation Fair, IInvenTiv-2024 at IIT Hyderabad on Friday.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan inaugurated the event which aims to exhibit the holistic impact of research from Higher Education Institutes and draw engagement from top industry stakeholders. It will unite 53 future-focused institutes to showcase 120 groundbreaking projects to over 2000 industry stakeholders.
IIT Mandi Researchers showcased their system under the sustainable technologies domain. The system developed by IIT Mandi is low-cost compared to the conventional monitoring system. The system has been developed by Dr Varun Dutt, Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, and Dr K V Uday, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, IIT Mandi.
The selling price of the system with its sensors and alerting mechanism is about Rs 1 lakh, which is 100-200 times less than a conventional counterpart that costs crores.
The developed system is indigenously developed and made. The machine learning algorithms developed and published recently depict options for predicting soil movements, at least a day ahead, while currently, the efforts are to scale it to a week’s scale. TNDMA, HP SDMA, DRDO, DST, and HPSCSTE have funded the research.
Dr Yadav explained that landslides caused significant infrastructure damage and loss of life each year, particularly in India. Early warnings generated from efficient monitoring can help mitigate the risks to human life, he added.
“A low-cost make-in-India innovation was developed at IIT Mandi to monitor soil properties, weather, and historical rainfall data at landslide-prone sites using IoT, MEMS, and AI-ML. The system uses sensors to collect data, which are then uploaded to a server for effective communication, providing local alerts, streams on a web interface, and sending SMS alerts via the phone to stakeholders,” he said.
He explained, “It also provides rainfall alerts and their damage potential ahead of time, with accurate predictions. This TRL-9 technology has already acquired incubations from IIT Mandi, IISc Bengaluru, and IIT Madras and has attracted investments from leading incubators in India and abroad. The system is currently deployed in more than 65 locations in the Himalayan region and has successfully alerted and prevented major disasters while being 70-100 times cheaper than conventional imported systems”.
The IIT Mandi team has received landslide monitoring system (LMS) deployment projects from several Himachal Pradesh districts including Mandi, Kinnaur, and Kangra. The project with districts Kinnaur, Mandi, and Kangra has already started. These projects will cause Himachal Pradesh state-wide deployment of LMSs, India’s largest number of LMS deployments.
IIT Mandi also signed a MoU with the District Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) Mandi and DDMA Kangra. The purpose of the MOU is to work towards the development of Landslide Monitoring and Early Warning Systems at certain sites. Early Warning Systems (EWS) will be developed and deployed based on site visits and analysis of these sites as per InSAR-based analysis and in confirmation with the district administration.
