HYDERABAD, India  — ISRO-NRSC and IIIT Hyderabad organized an AI for Space Immersion Program for startup and student-research teams from across the country. This day-long event brought together a dynamic community of startups, students, researchers, and industry experts, to foster innovation and explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in the space sector.

Ideas were reviewed by the scientists and guidance was given to refine and improve the ideas, 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, mentorship from ISRO scientists, interaction with IIITH faculty, pitch workshops, and inspiring talks, the participants had the opportunity to validate their ideas and connect with potential mentors and investors. The speakers at the inaugural and finale included Anand Rajagopalan of TM2Space, Naga Bharath of Skyroot, Vinod Bothala (Outstanding Scientist) of ISRO, Vijaya Bhanu (Director PD) of IN-SPACe, KV Ramana (Dep Director) of NRSC-ISRO, and P J Narayanan (Director) of IIITH.

The ISRO Immersion Challenge witnessed robust participation, with 177 applications received. Of these, 74 teams were invited for the immersion. The final 6 ideas included Green Propulsion for Satellites Delivery, AI-Powered Precision Rocket Control, Autonomous Swarm for Space Debris Cleanup, Precision Agriculture through crop surveys for accurate agricultural insights, and Democratizing Geospatial Data through a chat interface. The final winners were Expanse Cosmos (a startup based in Delhi) and Team Trishul (student team from Chandigarh).

Prof CV Jawahar, Dean at IIIT Hyderabad, said, “CIE at IIITH is an initiative to nurture innovations and startups based on support from research. We are very happy that ISRO and IIITH enabled this convergence of scientists, faculty, research students, startups and space enthusiasts to collectively come up with very interesting deep tech-based solutions for space.”