ASMA - Aerial Social-Distancing Monitoring Agent

Aerial Social-Distancing Monitoring Agent

Last year, when Kerala was going through the heaviest flood it has ever seen, I decided to build something that will help with the operations. Then, I had built an autonomous drone, that can navigate itself and find stranded survivors using thermal and RGB Cameras.

When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced, I knew the situation was serious. So I wanted to do my part my building this project.

ASMA is built on top of Tello by DJI and a Jetson Nano is used as the ground station and for video processing. Using Tello SDK, I have built a python wrapper for providing the autonomous flying capability for ASMA. Since the only sensor in the Tello is an optical flow sensor, I can track the path only in 2D. There is no object avoidance and no path planning. All of the autonomous functions are hardcoded.

Since the smart social distancing part is very compute-intensive, I decided to go with a Jetson Nano rather than a Raspberry Pi.

Jetson Nano combined with Google Coral USB Accelerator provided extremely good quality output.

I hope this project enables authorities to monitor social distancing in busy areas, detect non-mask wearers, and protect the lives of citizens.