Seminar Report on

“AI based Autonomous Drones in Fast Climate Change

Crisis”

Submi ed to the
Savitribai Phule Pune University
In par al fulfillment for the award of the Degree of Bachelor of Engineering in
Ar ficial Intelligence and Data Science by

SUMEET PRAKASH GAIKWAD

(21148040 (TE))
Under the guidance of

Prof P.G. Bangale

Department Of Ar ficial Intelligence and Data Science

Pune Vidyarthi Griha’s College of Engineering & Technology and G K Pate
(Wani ) Ins tute of Management Pune-09

1
AY 2023-2024

CERTIFICATE
This is to cer fy that the seminar report en tled “AI based Autonomous Drones
in Fast

Climate Change Crisis” being submi ed by SUMEET PRAKASH GAIKWAD (

21148040 (TE)) is a record of bonafide work carried out by him/her under
the supervision and guidance of Prof. P. G. Bangale in par al fulfillment
of the requirement for TE (Ar ficial Intelligence and Data Science) -2019
course of Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune in the academic year
2023-24.
Date: 14-102023
Place:
Pune

Dr. M. P.
Atre
Head of the Department
Prof. P. G.
Bangale
Guide

Dr. Manoj Taramble

Principal

2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It gave me great pleasure and sa sfac on in presen ng this seminar on “AI

Based Autonomous Drones in Fast Climate Change
Crisis”. I would like to express my deep sense of gra tude towards our
Informa on Technology Engineering Department and Guide for their
con nuous support in terms of Lab facili es etc.
I have furthermore to thank the Informa on Technology Department
HOD Dr. M.P.Atre Sir to encourage me to go ahead fearlessly and for
con nuous guidance. I also want to thank my guide for this Seminar
presenta on topic Prof. P.G.Bangale for all her support and guidance.
Last but not the least I would like to thank all those who directly nor
indirectly contributed in my presenta on of seminar comple on
successfully.
SUMEET PRAKASH GAIKWAD

3
 Abstract

Climate change poses a significant challenge to modern socie es, with

extreme events o en resul ng in drama c consequences. The integra on
of AI, IoT, and edge compu ng can lead to new approaches for real- me
tracking of natural disasters, reducing environmental footprints. This
ar cle proposes an AI-based pipeline for processing natural disaster
images from drones, aiming to reduce the number of images processed
by first responders. The pipeline consists of three main stages: a
lightweight autoencoder based on deep learning, a dimensionality
reduc on using the t-distributed stochas c neighbor embedding
algorithm, and a fuzzy clustering procedure. The pipeline is evaluated on
edge compu ng pla orms with low-power accelerators to assess the
design of intelligent autonomous drones for real me service. The
experimental evalua on focuses on flooding, showing a significant
reduc on in informa on processing. Edge compu ng pla orms with low-
power graphics accelerators are a compelling alterna ve for processing
heavy computa onal workloads, achieving a performance loss of only 2.3
mes compared to cloudbased versions.

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II
Contents

II
Abstract
III
Abbrevia ons
List of IV
Figures

List of V
Tables
Sr No. Name Page No.
1. Introduc on
1.1 1
Introduc on
1.2
Mo va on 2
1.3
Objec ves 2
2.
Literature Survey
2.1
Introduc on 3

Related work
2.2
Approaches

5
 3.Ai-Pipeline Proposed For Management Of Natural Disasters
3.1 Deep Learning Based .
Autoencoder
3.2 t-SNE Algorithm 14
3.3 Clustering Algorithm 14

3.4 AI pipeline 17
Ensemble
3.5 Hardware and So ware Environment
4. Applica ons
4.1
Applica ons
4.2 Advantages and Disadvantages
4
5. Conclusion 12
6. References 13

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 III

LIST OF FIGURES
Sr. No. Figure Name Page No.
3.1 DL based Autoencoder
3.2 Data points for flooding images (blue) a er Running t-
SNE Algorithm
3.3 FM Algorithms
3.4 Data points for flooding images (blue) a er Running FM
Algorithm
3.5 AI Pipeline
3.6 Natural Disaster Management Overview
3.7 Execu on me of the last two steps of the AI-pipeline.

LIST OF TABLES
Sr. No. Table Name Page No.
2.1 Literature Survey 11
3.1 Specifica ons 14
V

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 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO
“AI based Autonomous Drones in fast Climate Change
Crisis”
1.1 Introduc on to Seminar
Climate change has severe consequences, including loss of life and
ecosystems, and economic losses. Immediate decision-making is crucial in
disaster management situa ons. Technological advancements like drones
can improve preparedness and efficiency in response mes. However,
drones require qualified personnel to analyze large amounts of data.
Image processing techniques like machine learning and deep learning can
reduce errors. Edge compu ng, which processes data on devices at the
network's edge, offers energy savings, scalability, and data privacy.
Leading processor companies are developing energy-efficient solu ons,
such as the Nvidia Jetson family.
1.2 Mo va on behind seminar topic:
‘‘The mo va on behind the seminar topic "AI-based Autonomous Drones
in Fast Climate Change Crisis" is to explore cu ng-edge technology
solu ons for addressing the urgent challenges posed by climate change.
By leveraging ar ficial intelligence and autonomous drone technology, we
can improve data collec on, monitoring, and response capabili es in the
face of rapidly changing environmental condi ons. This seminar aims to

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 discuss the poten al of AI-driven drones in mi ga ng the impacts of
climate change by enhancing our ability to gather real- me data, conduct
environmental assessments, and implement mely interven ons,
ul mately contribu ng to more effec ve climate change mi ga on and
adapta on strategies.’’
1.3 Objec ve(s) of the work
• To Enhance Climate Modelling and Predic on
• To Enhance Disaster Preparedness
• To Op mize Resource Management
• To Enable Smart Climate Adapta on Strategies
• To Improve Disaster Response and Recovery

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE SURVEY OF “AI based Autonomous Drones in fast

Climate Change Crisis”

Reference Seed Idea/ Work

Name
Sr. (Write descrip on
No. Paper Title) Problems found

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1 Anderson, J. Limited ba ery
et al.(2020) life for extended
"Autonomous Introducing AIpowered missions, data
drones for real me climate accuracy during
Drones for
data collec on and adverse
Climate
crisis assessment. weather
Monitoring"
condi ons.

2
Patel, S. et al.
(2021) Naviga on in
dynamic
"AI-Enabled
Drones for environments,
Climate AIequipped drones for real me
Disaster disaster response during decisionmaking.
Response" climate crises.

Reference Seed Idea/ Work

Name
Sr. (Write descrip on
No. Paper Title) Problems found
3 Kim, Y. et Energy-
al.(2022) efficient hard-
"Op mizing ware design,
Energy op miza on of AI
Efficiency in algorithms.
AI-Enabled
Drones for

Addressing energy
consump on challenges in
AIenabled drones for
prolonged missions.
Table 1: Literature Survey

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Related work:

This sec on provides the main background on the different topics related
to this ar cle: UAVs, DL for ar ficial vision, and edge compu ng.
a) UAVs in Natural Disasters
UAVs have seen significant growth, with numerous applica ons in rescue
and survivor search tasks. The first works focused on using a single drone
for rescue and survivor search. Drones have also been used to analyze
landslides in Tibet and combine aerial images for natural disasters.
However, drone swarms offer poten al for extending mission coverage in
short me. Currently, few tests have been conducted with outdoor
mul copter swarms, and large-scale tests are rare due to communica on,
synchroniza on, and quality-ofservice issues.
b) Ar ficial Vision in Natural Disasters
Natural disasters require immediate decision-making, and image
processing techniques like SVMs, GAs, RF, FC, and KNNs are used for risk
detec on. Zhang et al. proposed EMD for airport ground changes, while
Nijhawan et al. proposed a hybrid framework using a convolu onal neural
network (CNN) and feature extrac on. However, these techniques
consume computa onal resources and are performed offline. This ar cle
explores designing these techniques for real- me image processing in
UAV swarms.
c) Edge Compu ng Pla orms
The history of compu ng has seen a shi from centralized to
decentralized approaches, with cloud compu ng becoming the most
widely used approach in the 21st century. Edge compu ng, which
provides compu ng power in close proximity to sensors or mobile
devices, offers benefits such as highly responsive cloud services, reduced
latency, increased bandwidth, and low ji er. The design of cloudlets must
be energy-efficient while providing the highest computa onal
horsepower possible. The microprocessor industry is releasing Systems
on Chip (SoCs) with low-power accelerators, such as GPUs or TPUs, to
address these challenges.

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CHAPTER 3
AI-PIPELINE PROPOSED FOR MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL
DISASTERS

3.0 Introduc on:

• The Al-pipeline proposed aims to reduce the number of drone-generated images
for firstresponders to assess the magnitude of natural disasters.
• It uses a deep-learning-based autoencoder to iden fy main features and reduce
dimensionality, then performs a clustering process to group images by similarity.
• The pipeline outputs images represen ng each cluster, which can be evaluated
by firstresponders for decision-making.
• The system is designed to be executed on edge compu ng pla orms, elimina ng
the need for internet connec on, making it suitable for remote loca ons.

3.1 Deep Learning based Autoencoder

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 • An autoencoder is a neural network architecture designed for feature
learning from unlabeled data.
• It consists of two layers: the encoder, responsible for data compression, and the

Fig. DL based Autoencoder

• decoder, which regenerates the input data.

• The proposed autoencoder is a convolu onal autoencoder (CAE), composed of
convolu onal networks that behave be er for this scenario. The CAE has a
simpler design, reducing the total number of parameters.
• It performs average pooling opera ons on the feature map extracted from the
central layer filters. The blocks in the CAE include convolu onal blocks, pooling
layers, deconvolu onal and unpooling blocks for the regenera on phase of the
original input.
• Convolu onal blocks filter input to create a feature map, while deconvolu onal
elements apply a 2-D transposed convolu on operator on input images.

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• Max Pooling and unpooling layers filter out noisy ac va ons and reconstruct the
original dimensionality.

3.2 t-SNE Algorithm • The proposed pipeline aims to reduce dimensionality for
easy informa on viewing and computa onal complexity.
• It employs a t-distributed stochas c neighbor embedding (t-SNE) algorithm,
which reduces the number of dimensions of input data.
• The algorithm uses the scikit-learn Python library to find joint probabili es based
on similari es between data points, minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence
between input data and low-dimensional embedding joint probabili es.
Fig. 2. Data points and images a er running the t-SNE algorithm.
(a) Data points for flooding images (blue), and others (green). (b) Images
corresponding to data points.

3.3 Clustering Algorithm

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• Clustering algorithms are data analysis techniques that organize ndimensional
data points into groups or clusters based on a metric defined in the algorithm.
• These algorithms are divided into two main groups: hard and so .
• Hard clustering techniques, such as the k-means algorithm, assign a probability
of belonging to each group to each data point.
• So clustering techniques, such as the fuzzy c-means (FCM) and fuzzy minimal
(FM) algorithms, do not require a parameter to be set in advance and do not
require compact wellseparated (CWS) clusters.
• This feature enables unsupervised clustering without condi oning the sets of
images obtained from each drone mission.
• The FM algorithm is an itera ve fixed-point algorithm that aims to minimize an
objec ve func on. It has two main func ons: se ng the maximum allowable
degree of error and calcula ng the r factor for the input data set.
• The r-factor measures the degree of homogeneity and isotropy breakdown of a
data set, and the membership func on measures the probability of an element
x to belong to a par cular cluster. These prototypes are the output of the FM
that represents the most significant images of the pipeline.

Algorithm 1: FMs Algorithm

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Pseudocode 1: LoadDataSetQ
2: Choose input variables E\ and ej-3:
r=CalculateFactorR(dataset) 4: PrototypeCalcula on(dataset. r)
Algorithm 2 Baselines of the FM PrototypeCalcula on. n Is the Size of
the Input Data Set. V Is a Vector With the Prototypes Found by FM. F Is
the Dimensionality (2 in
Our Case)

1:

2;
3:
4:

5: 6:
7: 8:

9: 10
:
1
1:
16

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2: 13
:

Fig. 3 Data points and images a er running the FM algorithm. (a) Data
points of flooding images (blue), others (green), and prototypes obtained
by the FM algorithm (red). (b) Images closer to the prototype found by
FM. 3.4 AI pipeline Ensemble

The proposed Al-pipeline is applicable a er CAE training, star ng with raw

images processed through an autoencoder.

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• The trained autoencoder compresses main features in the conv4 layer, which
outputs a matrix with a transforma on of the input image obtained by applying
filters.
• The new output layer is removed, and the en re data set is iterated to extract
all filters for each image.
• Each image is converted into matrix-represented filters, and Average (AVG)
polling is applied to each filter to create a downsampled feature map.
• The AVG polling calculates the mean of each block of each filter, resul ng in a 1-
D vector for each filter. These vectors are concatenated to form a single vector
for extrac ng relevant CAE informa on.
• The t-SNE algorithm is applied to embed all images into a 2-D array grouped by
similarity detected a er applying t-SNE.
• The op mal number of clusters is determined using fuzzy logic-based clustering
using the FM algorithm. The extracted informa on allows each image to be
labeled for submission, and images represen ng prototypes are sent for follow-
up by first responders.
3.5 Solu on Deployment and Execu on Flow
3.6 The proposed AI-pipeline for natural disaster management involves drones

star ng from a standby posi on to prepare for take-off and taking images
of affected areas. • The pipeline is executed in three steps: training the
autoencoder, which is performed once for each affected area, and the
inference stage, which is executed as many mes as surveillance missions
are performed by the drone.
• The training stage provides neural network weights for the next missions, while
the inference stage generates and reduces the feature vector using t-SNE and
clusters it using FM. The most significant images are selected and sent in step 4.
• The pipeline is designed to have a low memory footprint and only uses images

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 captured during the mission, elimina ng the need for knowledge transfer with
pretrained network weights using other data sets.
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3. Device processing Fig. 4. Classes within the AIDER data set. g.
3. Natural disasters management overview.

Fig.6 Natural Disaster Management Overview

3.5 Hardware and So ware Environment
• The study compared four architectures: Pedra, a high-performance compu ng
node, and three low-power edge compu ng devices from the NVIDIA Jetson
family. (i.e., Jetson nano, Jetson TX2, and Jetson AGX Xavier).
• Although Pedra cannot be mounted directly on UAVs due to its weight, size, and
energy consump on, it could be used via a cloud solu on when mobile Internet
speed and coverage are sufficient.
• The main goal was to determine if the AI-pipeline proposed for GPUs decreases
calcula on me, if it can be performed in the edge in a reasonable me frame,
and which pla orm is most suitable.
Table 2 _ Specifica ons

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 Reference: AI based Autonomous Drones in Fast Climate Change
Crisis (IEEE 2022)

CHAPTER 4 APPLICATIONS
Natural Disaster Assessment:
• Drones can quickly assess the impact of natural disasters like hurricanes,
earthquakes, and wildfires, helping first responders and decision-makers
allocate resources effec vely. Forest Management:
• Drones can assess the health of forests, iden fy deforesta on, and es mate
carbon sequestra on poten al. They can also support reforesta on efforts.
Weather Forecas ng and Climate Modelling:
• Drones can gather cri cal weather and climate data in real- me, improving the
accuracy of weather forecasts and climate models. Marine Wildlife Protec on:
• Autonomous drones can aid in the protec on of marine life by iden fying
illegal fishing ac vi es and monitoring the movement of marine species. Flood
Monitoring:
• They can monitor water levels in rivers and iden fy poten al flood-prone
areas, allowing for early warnings and evacua on plans. Waste Management:
• They can monitor landfill sites, detect illegal dumping, and op mize waste
collec on routes to reduce carbon emissions.

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ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES
4.2 Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages:
Data Collec on and Analysis:
• AI drones can collect vast amounts of data, including temperature, air
quality, and carbon dioxide levels, which can provide valuable insights into
climate change pa erns.
• They can also analyze this data in real- me, helping scien sts and
policymakers make informed decisions. Forest Monitoring:
• Drones equipped with AI can monitor forests for illegal logging,
deforesta on, and forest fires. This helps in the preserva on of carbon
sinks and the protec on of biodiversity. Natural Disaster Predic on and
Response:
• AI drones can help predict natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and
wildfires, allowing for early warnings and be er disaster response
planning.
Disadvantages:
High Ini al Costs:
• Developing and deploying AI drones with advanced technology can be
expensive, which may limit their accessibility to certain organiza ons or
regions. Limited Payload:
• Drones have limited payload capacity, which can restrict the types of
sensors and equipment they can carry for data collec on. Maintenance
and Reliability:
• Drones require regular maintenance and may experience technical failures
or crashes, which can disrupt data collec on efforts.

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CONCLUSION
• Autonomous UAVs could significantly contribute to addressing climate
change, but they require significant hardware and so ware improvements.
• The integra on of AI and edge compu ng could transform autonomous
drones into useful tools in emergency situa ons.
• This seminar proposes an AI-based pipeline for processing drone images of
natural disasters.
• The technology could be a significant milestone in comba ng climate
change. However, further work is needed to improve communica on,
energy efficiency, and processing steps.
• TinyML is a promising step forward in this direc on. The AI pipeline could
also include more processing steps, allowing for more granular
categoriza on of images.
• Real-case scenarios will be explored with first responders to iden fy new
features and requirements.

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REFERENCES
1. R. Dellink, E. Lanzi, and J. Chateau, “The sectoral and regional economic
consequences of climate change to 2060,” Environ. Resour. Econ., vol. 72, no. 2,
pp. 309-363, 2019.
2. S. K. Sood and K. S. Rawat, “A scientometric analysis of ICTassisted disaster
management,” Nat. Hazards, vol. 106, pp. 2863-2881, Jan. 2021.
3. H. Shakhatreh et al., “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): A survey on civil
applica ons and key research challenges,” IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 48572-48634,
2019.
4. M. A. R. Estrada and A. Ndoma, “The uses of unmanned aerial vehicles—
UAV’s(or drones) in social logis c: Natural disasters response and humanitarian
relief aid,” Procedia Comput. Sci., vol. 149, pp. 375-383, Mar. 2019.
5. Y. E. Wang, G.-Y. Wei, and D. Brooks, “Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU
pla orms for deep learning,” 2019. [Online]. Available: arXiv:1907.10701.

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