Published Paper Details:

Our team has developed a drone-based surveillance system for vessels plying in port areas. The surveillance system will have a 24x7 bird's eye view for absolute situational awareness, vessel tracking & traffic monitoring, encroachment monitoring, maritime recon & surveillance, data collection, disaster management, and similar applications. Most ports have sprawling water and land areas where licenses are issued by the port authorities to marine vessels for plying within port limits. A cost-effective solution is required to track and report harbour crafts such as boats, barges and dinghies that ply in the port water limits and monitor encroachments in port limits. To achieve this, our solution involves two drones, 'Garuda' and 'Shikara', each defining a different tier, that work hand in hand to give us the optimum solution for the problem of monitoring such a large area round the clock with complete situational awareness. Each tier has dedicated functions like surveillance and first response. This paper describes the entire process of recognizing pain points, ideation for solution, designing the system and each subsystem, realizing the product, and testing along with results and analyses in utmost detail. Serving as a guide and documentation for future solutions, this paper aims to describe our developed system in a manner such that it will aid in the development of better solutions for this critical application.