17 YO Will Compete for $1M “Drones for Good” Award

 Dhruv Karthik, a 17 year old student in Dubai, is the youngest finalist in the history of the ‘Drones for Good’ competition, and he’s going it alone.  Karthik is the only individual finalist, competing against teams made up of professors, grad students, and business startups for the $1m prize.

Dhruv’s entry is FIREFLY, a search and rescue drone that can search for people stranded after fires or natural disasters.  Dhruv says his inspiration came after witnessing a devastating fire in Dubai on New Year’s Eve a few years ago.

“The biggest problem fire-fighters face is lack of knowledge,” says Dhruv in his explanation of FIREFLY.  “They don’t know which floor still has occupied people, which floor has safely evacuated itself, and which floor is occupied by someone may be in grave danger.”

“FIREFLY is an Artificial Intelligence and computer vision platform that allows a drone to autonomously and efficiently navigate through apartments in search of stranded people. It has zero prior knowledge about the apartment it enters, and traverses through its environment with extremely minimal outside help,” says Dhruv. “…FIREFLY is a drone that incorporates the technology necessary to inform a firefighter about the status of every apartment in a skyscraper in a rapid and efficient manner. This is information that they greatly need to minimise time wasted through searching empty apartments, when they could rather be evacuating an injured person in another apartment.”

FIREFLY uses “a cheap commercial drone” modified with an Arduino Mini to make it autonomous. Dhruv explains that FIREFLY is a drone agnostic platform based on computer vision and AI programming.

The year-long contest is sponsored by the government of the UAE. “The UAE Government invite the most innovative and creative minds to find solutions that will improve people’s lives and provide positive technological solutions to modern day issues,” says the contest’s mission statement: the significant prize money attracts the best and brightest from around the world. The contest finals will be held in Dubai on February 17th and 18th.

Next year, Dhruv hopes to attend university in the US to pursue a career in AI and robotics.