Vote Now - Top 5 Entries: 'Engineering For Change In India' Project Report Contest

1. Problem Definition:
System, Apparatus Design for Enabling Differential Power Shutdown Based on Appliance /House hold Power Consumption.

2. Problem Description:
Since ages food, cloth, shelter are treated as basic needs for living but in the current day scenario electricity / power can be incorporated as a fourth basic need. One cannot imagine day without electricity and the three essential needs food processing, textile manufacturing, construction works cannot be carried out without electricity. The importance of electricity day-to-day life, its increasing scarcity is a widely discussed topic and does not require any introduction.

In order to balance the supply and demand of electricity, it is a current day practice to completely shut down power to a particular location (which involves power cut for each and every electronic equipment present in multiple houses, industries etc.).

But looking deep in to this problem, high wattage or high power consuming appliances within a house such as Air conditioner, Refrigerator, Television sets, Heaters / Greasers etc. needs to be powered off than mandatorily used low power consuming appliance such as bulbs, laptop chargers, mobile chargers, toaster etc. in case of power shortage. Due to heavy dependence on electric gadgets, one cannot carry out their tasks without electricity and each individual can understand that the reason behind power failure could be a technical problem or a balancing activity to meet the supply-demand needs.

Assume a scenario where electricity demand for a particular region has suddenly increased and in order to meet the demands the substation authority decided to schedule a power cut for certain time period to this region, this will help the substation to reserve the power and use it to meet the increased demands. During the power cut timings, each and every house / gadget within a house is not provided with electricity. But it in order to reserve electricity, enforcement of power cut on high power consuming appliances would be sufficient instead of power cut for entire house which consists of mandatory gadgets such as laptop charger, mobile charger, bulb, fan etc. that makes individuals life frustrating / miserable.

The core reason for the above discussed situation is traditional broad cast based topology used for power distribution which enforces the power cut for an entire region, but does not provide a granular control interface that facilitates grid to apply selective power shutdown on high power consuming appliances within a house than enforcing power cut on entire house.


3. What happens if the problem is left unattended?
There are several problems if this is not solved. Some of them are faced by every individual in his day to day life. They are:

>>Due to complete power cut the region contained houses consists of kids preparing for examination and the timings of power cut got overlapped with their preparation time.

>>The region of power cut may also include software engineers who had to deliver his work in time. But do to power cut his internet stops working due to the power cut in the local internet service provider region.

>>Charging a mobile is now a days an important task. A single phone call may now make many changes in future. But due to power cut we were not able to power up the phone which is in dead condition.

>>Without the presence of power in house any individual(including children) will feel frustrated because the present day humans are well connected technology(which includes fan, television).

>>Some of the small scale firms are closed due to power cut.

>> In the current day scenario there is no alternative left for the houses but to power up their appliances with generator / inverter during power cut timings. This action calls for more money, effort and environment pollution etc.


4. Proposed Technical Solution:
Core idea is a provision of a system (Software Engine) design integrated / embedded with destination points / power sinks (that can be energy meters deployed at house hold, or meters deployed at industries) and comes in to action during energy balancing which helps to provide an interface for grid to selectively power off high power consuming electronic appliances within a house / industry instead of complete power shutdown for entire region / house (i.e. provides a smart interface to selectively power off high power consuming appliances and keeping all mandatory low power consuming gadgets alive during power shutdown which takes place for maintaining balance between supply and demand).

When a situation arises like necessity to provide power for a particular house or to provide power to all low power consuming appliances (and powering off high power consuming appliances) in all houses during power cut off timings. The proposed system (engine integrated with deployed energy meters) is triggered and gets registered using mobile / wireless network with the central grid using unique ID. All these unique ID's from each house are integrated with an interface at the grid which enables the power administrator to applying multiple selective power OFF/ON schemes.

Installation of proposed system flow:

Energy meter + proposed system -> Registers with central grid application using unique ID

Elements of proposed system:

Proposed system -> Mobile / wireless communicator + Soft layer fuse + protocol which helps to identify the state of high power consuming appliances.

Proposed work flow for applying selective power cut on houses within a region:

Central Grid application (containing list of unique ID per house) -> Apply power cut command on all houses ->Proposed engine receives this command via mobile / wireless communicator ->triggers / breaks the fuse -> All houses powered off Select the ID (house) to provide power -> Apply power ON command on this ID -> Proposed engine receives this command via mobile / wireless communicator -> triggers / activates the fuse -> This particular house is powered ON remaining other houses are enforced with power cut.

Proposed work flow for applying selective power cut on appliances within a house:

Central Grid application (containing list of unique ID per house) -> Apply power cut command on high power consuming appliances within all houses (power consumption can be calculated and decided by administrator) -> Proposed engine deployed at all houses receives this command via mobile/wireless communicator -> triggers the protocol to identify the state of high power consuming appliances-> If high power consuming appliance is in utilization mode -> breaks the software fuse (applied per house) -> if low power consuming gadgets are in utilization mode (all together or summation of the power utilization per gadget should be less than the restricted power consumption) -> Power On per house (this power calculation is done per house).

5. Estimated Time and Cost

Cost Estimation:
>>Recycling the present Energy meters and adding above mentioned feature to them can cost up to few crores as this idea is to be implemented throughout the India.
>>Necessary software Development can cost a few crores.
>>Man power for installation would require a few crores. But this can be reduced by using present employees of power management systems.

Time Estimation:
>>The Development of Software Platform can take 1 year approximately.
>> Recycling the present Energy meters and adding above mentioned feature to them can take a year.
>>If this entire project is given to a single organization then the entire process can be implemented within 2 years because this project is not from the scratch it is just a matter of redesigning.

6. Resources Needed

There are several resources needed to implement the given thought. The resources required include:-

>>Energy meters with above mentioned capability.
>>Software GUI module with excellent hardware support.
>>Manpower with technical knowledge for installation.
>>Center grid application with software support.
>>A Protocol which helps to identify the state of high power consuming appliances.

1. Problem Definition
Inaccessibility of common people to NGO’s of any city without having proper contacts.

2. Problem Description
Armaan is an undernourished child and lives in MotherCare NGO. He is suffering from excessive malnutrition. Aaliya is a youngster who wants to help kids like Sam. But she does not know whom to contact or how to find his location. There are many more similar cases like this where people want to help and support but do not know where they should go. In a concise manner, there is very less accessibility between NGO’s and the people who want to help.

3. What happens if problem is left unattended?
Any organization in the world is set up for a cause, and being a working body, it has to maintain its work, work in a team and manage funds for its continuous progress. And when we are talking about a cause, Non-Government Organization are one of those working bodies, which are non-profit, citizen funded organizations i.e. they have to raise funds in some way or the other as they work independently. Also they rely on various sources for different operations, salaries and over-head costs. For that, they expect not much but a little support from us. And there are lot of people who want to extend their helping hand so that they can give back something to the society. But the problem arises when an active citizen does not know who needs help and where. Though, these bodies work at international and national levels, still the person can least find such organizations in his/her own city. This is a strange fact that with the advent of technology, still we are not able to use it more effectively for the societal cause. The problem is that common people are not able to access these organizations directly but they have to toil hard and go through a tedious process of searching and finding them.

4. Proposed Technical Solution
NGOFinder: To explore NGO’s in the neighborhood using Android Platform.

The application offers the following benefits:
· Gives information about NGO’s in 5 km radius of your current location.
· Gives information about all the NGO’s in your current city.

NGOFinder is dedicated to provide an android accessibility to those who are looking to contribute to a societal cause and help the affected people.

The application will have a menu page consisting of 5 categories namely:


Once the user selects one of the categories he/she is given two options based on the location criteria.
• Within 5Km
• Current City

After selecting one of these options again all the NGO’s in the neighborhood are shown on a map. This map is linked to the google map server which helps in finding the location.

The application will be able to give following information of any NGO according to the category:
· Phone Number
· Address
· Contact of the Authorized Person
· Email address
· Website

Also, the application will be able to accept the User’s details so that whichever NGO you are looking for, you can directly contact there either through a request or can connect to the application developer who will be responsible to communicate further.


There will also be a list of places and locations in the city entered other than NGO’s, where the user can find underprivileged or differently abled people. Also, There will be an option where the NGO can itself contact the user as the user details will be sent to the NGO on request.


5. Estimated Time & Cost
Approximately 3-4 month is required to develop this application along with its testing. After that it is ready to release in the Android market.

Being an Android application, its cost is negligible.

6. Resourced Needed

1. Android Phone
2. Application developer having good knowledge of Java and Android Application Development.
3. Eclipse IDE-JAVA environment for coding of the application(open source software)
4. Android Emulator -A virtual mobile device that runs on our computer -use to design, debug, and test our applications in an actual Android run-time environment
5. Android Development Tools Plugin -for the Eclipse IDE - adds powerful extensions to the Eclipse integrated environment
6. Dalvik Debug Monitor Service (DDMS) -Integrated with Dalvik -this tool let us manage processes on an emulator and assists in debugging
7. Android Asset Packaging Tool (AAPT) – Constructs the distributable Android package files (.apk)
8. Android Debug Bridge (ADB) – provides link to a running emulator. Can copy files to emulator, install .apk files and run commands.

Document Attestation and verification is a major path barrier for Government and Business operation success.”Datafly” is the Answer.

2. Problem Description:
Data gathering in Business sector( Banking, Loan, Telecom, RTO, Passport) is a major constraint, so is data verification on the go. People need to gather relevant document, bring that to the main office where it is sent to verification department and upon verification goes for clearance. This conventional process has been one of the major headache for the businesses and government officials. Then you have other problem which includes missing document, inappropriate ones. Also attestation by gadgeted officer consumes officer’s and common public’s time.

Therefore there is a need of a good automation of this whole process. Recently government of India has declared that all document attestation would be self attested. However self attestation leaves a scope for forgery.

Therefore we offer a solution called Datafly that would enable automated authentication of person and his documents.



3. What happens if the problem is left unattended?
In either Business of Government sector, any form ( Exam Forms, Customer Application form)needs supporting documents which are copied version of the original countersigned by the person. Most of the applications also needs person’s photo which he needs to do attestation by some gadgeted officer. In order to prove that documents are correct, person needs to counter sign on it.

It raises several issues:
1)A lot of time by the person is spent on documentation and attestation.
2)For same work he has to spend time again and again. For example this painfull process has to be taken up for passport application, driving license application, for banking exams, for PhD registration and exams. Thus a lot of productive time of the person is wasted in repetitive job.
3)A busy gadgeted officer has to spend time in signing and verifying person which is a waste of his production time.
4)In a country where number of skilled people are less, lot of resources are spent on document verification by various agencies which is a huge investment.
5)As India’s population is growing at GP rate, this problem would become an exponentially complex, time and resource consuming exercise if not solved in time.
6)Leaving this problem unattended would lead to a situation where a good 20% time of overall process and about 5% resources would have to be spent on documentation and verification process alone leading to several thousand crores of losses every year which could have been better utilized by investing in job generating sectors.

4. Proposed Technical Solution:
Person feed primary details like address, phone number, email id into the form. The process is much easy with tablets. Once the form elements are processed, the app asks the person to take the photographs of the documents. The capturing is performed using EmguCV with C#. Once the document is captured, the software searches for a face in the document using EmguCV's face detection library. If faces are not found, automatically the document is rejected and system requests the person to recapture the document or provide another document with clearer face. Once face is located, it is saved as reference face. It asks person to take a photograph of the customer. using the same face detection library the face part is segmented and snap of only face is taken by the system. This is matched with the reference face. Remember scale of both the photographs will be different. Hence conventional PCA based based face recognition will not work in this case. We need to adopt and implement Adaptive local binary pattern based face recognition system. Manhattan distance of the normalized faces are obtained and threshold to check the percentage of match. If the percentage is high, the process authenticates the face. It follows that up by extracting the address from address proof using EmguCV's OCR Library. Point to be noted is that as the address proof document is essentially a bill, it will have several text other than the address. TF-IDF based text matching will be adopted to match OCR text and address entered in the adress box. If validated, it provides the customer with an option to sign on tablet. He can use fingers or stylus to sign the document. Directional vectors from the signature can further be used for future verification.

It accepts the application and serialize entire text and images into a single xml document.

Interesting part is that images can be converted to utf text using encoding. Thus photo, and images of proofs along with form elements can all be put in a single xml file. The executive need not to create any directory or follow any manual process. As xml is understood by all platforms including Android and iOS, developing the solution to a cross platform solution also becomes viable.

The xml file can be sent to respective authority either through a webservice or could be uploaded to cloud account or could even be emailed to the respective authority. For this app we are going to use SOAP and webservices with our own infrastructure and refrain from using a cloud.

This decision allows us to design the solution so that data can be uploaded directly to Telecom provider's server from where it will be polled by validation agency.


Working Demo Video:



5. Estimated Time and Cost
Total Cost: Around 25,00,000/- ( Rupees Twenty Five Lack Only)
Total Time: About two weeks for a team of four of efficient coders.

The project utilizes some of the technologies that already exists like OCR, Face Detection, Text matching. Thus the responsibility of the developer here is to utilize these available technologies and come up with a workable solution.

The whole process demands about 200 Man Hour of Coding and Testing. At an international standard of about $200 par hour , the total investment is about $40,000 which is about 25,00,000/- ( Rupees Twenty Five Lack).

Assuming a team of four , the work can be effectively completed in 50 Man Hour. Assuming a developer can produce 5 man hour of work every day, the whole concept can be completed in about two weeks time by a team of four members.

There are several effective cloud services like Skydrive, Google drive, dropbox which provides easy storage solution from code. Thus post validation document sending to executive is also easy. Cheap services and open source solution makes the development much easier and quicker.

6. Resources Needed

1. IDE: Visual Studio.Net 2012 for .Net, Eclipse for Java
2. Language: C#.Net or Java
3. Front End Technology: WPF or Android XAML
4. Computer Vision Library: OpenCV
5. Hardware Required: Windows/ Android Tablet with Front and Back camera
6. Backend: Cloud Storage Service like Skydrive/Dropbox
7. Manpower: Four Experienced Coders: Two in UI Design and Two in Computer Vision.
8. Other Requirement: Internet Connectivity for testing cloud integration

1. Problem Definition:
BILLING ON BASKET (BOB) / e-CART / ADD TO CART

2. Problem Description:
We all are fed up of standing in long queues for checkout after buying products from retail departmental stores.
Personal Observation: Time required to pick products < Checkout Time

3. What happens if the problem is left unattended?
Lots of our precious time is wasted standing in queue to get the billing done, More Manpower are required for operation, unpleasant shopping experience.

4. Proposed Technical Solution:
An Automated cart Machine having an inbuilt bar code Scanner which scans the product details & save the result for final billing, It works as the product is picked & placed in upper tray, an scanner scans the product. after which the upper door is opened to drop the item into basket.

The base of the basket has load cells to continuously monitor the total weight on it.
At the checkout section a sensor detects the arrival of kart & ask for final billing.

If the two weights (the product weight received after scan against the reading from the load cells) are found same then it’ll generate the final bill . If not then there’s some discrepancy which need to be attended by the operator.

The operator then scan all the items with the hand held scanner & process the final billing.

Payment is done through Cash / Card Swipe.

Flowchart:


5. Estimated Time and Cost
The project is still in documented state/
Estimated time to build a prototype model may take ~ 8 to 10 month for its first trial.
Cost is still unaccountable.

6. Resources Needed
We need to make modifications in kart design by adding bar code scanner , building infrastructure, billing software.

Advanced bore well Inspection Rescue Robot.

2. Problem Description:
In India every year bore well accidents are being increased. And almost 80% of cases child losing their life. And 92% of the children are of age below 10. Due to the narrow diameter of the bore well, it is very difficult to an adult person go in to the bore well and save the child. So definitely there required a saving machinery. There are so many cases that can be mentioned. Recently in Bijapur [Karnataka] a 4-year girl akshata died by trapped in to bore well. To decrease the death rate there definitely need a saving mechanism. This project proposes a saving mechanism.


3. What happens if the problem is left unattended?
If the problem left unattended the scope of saving the life of the child remains constant and death rate due to bore well accidents will be increased.

4. Proposed Technical Solution:
This project is mainly divided in to two parts i.e., Data capture unit and Data receiver & control Unit.

Data capture unit comprises of wireless camera transmitter, oxygen level sensor, temperature sensor, audio receiver unit and Zigbee transceiver. This will be in a robot form which reaches the child who caught in the bore well and transmits live captured video. Sensor data will be transmitted through zigbee and voice from the control unit will be received by audio receiver unit.


Data receiver and control unit comprises of zigbee transceiver, AV receiver and an audio transmitter. Sensor data from the Data capture unit will be received by zigbee module and displayed in the system. And control signals of the Robot will be transmitted through zigbee. AV data from the capture unit will be received by AV receiver and will be displayed in the system. Audio transmitter is used to communicate with the child in the bore well. The robot movement and holding will be controlled through the PC using an interface application. And the control signals are transmitted using zigbee.


5. Estimated Time and Cost

The programming and hardware part will consume less time, but the mechanical part will consume more time and even to test in different cases it will take some time. So approximately 75 days required to build this project.
And cost wise the electronic circuitry costs around Rs.5000.

The mechanical and motors costs around Rs.8000.
So total estimated R&D cost will be Rs.13000.

6. Resources Needed

In software terms we need visual studio for application development, KEIL IDE for microcontroller programming and debugging.
In hardware terms we need ARM7 [LPC2148] development kit, and two ZIGBEE modules, a video transmitter and receiver set, audio transmitter and receiver set and few stepper motors and mechanical chassis and etc.

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