ISRO is organizing ‘Immersion Challenge’ at IIIT-H

Hyderabad: ISRO-NRSC and IIIT Hyderabad organised an ‘AI for Space Immersion’ programme for startups and research-student teams from across the country.

The day-long event brought together a dynamic community of startups, students, researchers and industry experts to foster innovation and explore the transformative potential of AI in the space sector.

The ISRO Immersion Challenge saw a huge response, with 177 entries received. Out of these, 74 teams were invited for the immersion. The six finalist ideas included Green Propulsion for satellite delivery, AI-powered precision Rocket Control, Autonomous Swarm for cleaning space debris, Precision Agriculture through crop research to obtain accurate agricultural information, and Democratising Geospatial Data through a chat interface.

The final winners were Expanse Cosmos (a Delhi-based startup) and Team Trishul (a student team from Chandigarh).

CIE-IIIT Hyderabad and ISRO with support from IN-SPACe organized this innovation event to seed interesting new ideas and solutions for space. Through interactive ideation sessions, mentoring by ISRO scientists, interaction with IIIT-H faculty, pitch workshops and inspiring talks, participants had an opportunity to validate their ideas and connect with potential mentors and investors.

The speakers at the inauguration and finale included Anand Rajagopalan from TM2Space, Naga Bharath from Skyroot, Vinod Bothala (Eminent Scientist) from ISRO, Vijaya Bhanu (PD Director) from IN-SPACe, KV Ramana (Deputy Director) from NRSC-ISRO, PJ Narayanan (Director) from IIIT-H.

Prof. CV Jawahar, Dean, IIIT Hyderabad, said, “CIE at IIIT-H is an initiative to foster innovation and startups based on research support. We are very happy that ISRO and IIIT-H have facilitated this coming together of scientists, faculty, student researchers, startups and space enthusiasts to come up with some very interesting deep technological solutions for space.”