Mr. Ojasva Goyal, student of Department of Civil Engineering has bern awarded the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Young Research Fellowship 2024–25 for the project titled: Deep Learning and UAV-Based System for Automated Wheat Rust Detection and Smart Agricultural Decision-Making fwhich he completed under the guidance of Prof. Srinivas Rallapalli. This fellowship, instituted by the TERRE Policy Centre, recognizes researchers across India working at the intersection of sustainability, innovation, and societal impact.

📌 Fellowship Info
Name: Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Young Research Fellowship 2024–25

Organized by: TERRE Policy Centre

Date of Announcement: 23rd May 2025

Award Ceremony: 27th July 2025

Benefits: Fellowship certificate, seed funding support, national-level recognition | Fellowship awarded will be up to INR 25,000 (Rs. Twenty-five Thousand only), and the minimum fellowship amount will be INR 10,000 (Rs. Ten Thousand only).

Result Link: Click here

Process: Application -> Interview & Presentation

Project summary:

This project builds a UAV-powered, smart platform for early detection of wheat rust and actionable agronomic guidance, addressing one of India’s major food security threats through scalable, field-ready innovation.

✅ HybridEff-Res Attention Network – An attention-enabled, dual-backbone CNN model, achieving 98.8% accuracy and 0.98 F1-score in rust classification.

✅ Edge AI Deployment – Real-time inference (<100 ms) on Jetson Nano/Xavier/Orin devices; enables offline, low-power operation in rural areas.

✅ Visual Q&A + RAG – Farmers receive natural-language answers to questions like “What type of rust?” or “What spray to use?”, powered by VQA and retrieval-augmented generation.

✅ Federated Learning – Local model updates without exporting raw images, preserving farmer data privacy.

✅ Scalability – Field-tested system ready for real-world deployment with roadmap toward “mother-child drone” architecture for automated spot-spraying.

✅ Validation & IP – Published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio, IF 5.8); second paper under review in Computers & Electronics in Agriculture (Elsevier, IF 8.3); provisional patent filed through the BITS Pilani IPR cell