IIT Hyderabad Students win ‘Smart India Hackathon 2019’

Hyderabad: An Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad team has won the ‘Smart India Hackathon 2019’ for coming up with a solution to a problem on Steel Construction. They won a prize money of Rs. 75,000/-.

SNAAPP, a team of 6 M.Tech. in Communication and Signal Processing, did non-stop coding for 36 hours and delivered the mobile application as part of their proposed solution.

The problem statement was to develop a mobile application which can manage the hierarchical system of updating construction site progress and can generate reports directly via the app for managers and higher authorities.

Speaking about the victory, Dr. Abhinav Kumar, Team Mentor of SNAAPP and Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, said, “Team SNAAPP has delivered an innovative solution to the construction site progress update problem. My heartiest congratulations to all the team members.”

The application is structured in two parts such as the Manager’s Dashboard and Site Engineer’s Dashboard. Different site engineers from different areas will provide the details in the form of text and images. Timestamp and GPS location will be taken automatically. GPS location and timestamp will verify the authenticity of the images. Once the report is submitted from Site Engineer’s app, it will reflect on the Manager’s Dashboard and he can check the progress there on a real-time basis. Other than that, site engineer can ask for material, machine or workforce requirements, if needed. The algorithm is written to help in generating reports on a daily and Weekly basis.

The objective for the application is to keep awareness about construction progress and maintain the reports in real time so as to improve work efficiency. The application is developed to solve the hierarchical issue faced by the manager and higher authorities about the construction update and difficulties faced by the labours and site engineers. The application is developed for android mobile phones for now.

Ø Provides timely and systematic updates

Ø Managers will have access to see the progress report on his dashboard as per the requirement

Ø Shows images for the work progress which confirms the actual site progress

Ø Will provide the organisation’s region wise distribution of the work progress

Speaking about the competition, Mr. Siddharth Gupta, Team Leader of SNAAPP, said, “Each one of us worked hard for the successful completion of the idea and deliver the prototype within the time limit. We are planning to work with the Ministry of Human Resource Development for further extension of the project and produce it as a commercial product for construction industries.”

As the application sends updates directly from the authorities which are working on the field, this will reduce the time gap between site engineers and managers. It will also help in optimizing the cost incurred compared to the expected cost. The application can assign tasks to site engineers and get feedback/alerts from them. The application will help in maintaining the project timeline as it will show the project delay and asking rate of construction work.

In today’s data-driven world of technology, the application will be helpful in building a credible database for infrastructure construction domain. The database created will be further used to train the deep learning networks to track down the suitability of steel structure buildings with specific geographic location and climate condition. This promising analysis will help companies to invest more resources in steel buildings for homes, offices. It will be further updated to provide voice assistance to manager and site engineers. Limited access to the application will be provided to Government agencies to ensures that the predefined norms of construction to be followed and to investors, for assured them about the credibility of their investments.

The team comprises of Mr. Siddharth Gupta, Team leader of SNAAPP and 2nd year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing); Mr. Prabhat Kumar Rai, 2nd year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing); Ms. Nisha Akole, 1st year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing); Mr. Ajay Hase, 1st year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing); Mr. Prasad Gaikwad, 1st year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing); Mr. Aman Agarwal; 1st year of M.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Communication and Signal Processing).