Yash Agarwal and Kritika Jain were taking a walk around their college NIIT’s campus in Rajashtan back in 2014, when a speeding vehicle almost hit them. This made them realise the need for a technology-driven solution to ensure vehicles adhere to speed limit within gated societies.
By gated societies, they refer to areas secured by gates and security guards at entry and exit points. These areas include, but are not limited to, residential townships, business centres, college campuses, hospitals, shopping malls, airports and corporate structures. Yash says that these areas are equally prone to accidents due to over speeding vehicles and reckless driving.
Yash and Kritika then started working on a reliable solution to cater to the problem of over speeding, reckless driving, real-time parking assistance and unavailability of prompt facilitation of emergency services along with a few faculty members in September 2014.
“We found that most of these communities have a speed limit of 15-20 kmph. However, over 80% don’t follow these boards. And no society has any technology platform that checks this problem,” Yash says.
They then started working on a prototype that could track the speed and location of a vehicle and can even control its speed. “Some of these spaces have restricted areas for visitors. So our technology can keep a track of where the vehicle is going.” Yash adds.
They built a prototype that is a customised security solution for vehicle monitoring and driver assistance systems targeting gated societies.
Having documented their work with a proof of concept, Yash and Kritika presented their proof-of-concept along with a prototype at the IEEE 4th International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo held in October 2015 at Shenzhen, China.
Here, they were able to collaborate with Dr Orkun Karabasoglu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Joint Institute of Engineering, Director at The Laboratory for Intelligent Vehicles and Energy Systems, who was working on a similar solution.
With their final prototype in place, they conducted a pilot trial at the Joint Research Institute in Shunde, China in March 2016 on five vehicles, over 2-3 days to validate the effectiveness of the product. Through the pilot, they found that the total number of speed violations of the vehicle drivers on whom the pilot was conducted was reduced by 63% in just two days.
With validation in place, Yash and Kritika founded Trackyo in September 2016 with an initial investment of Rs 10 lakh.
How it works
Every time a vehicle enters a gated society, the security guard scans the number plate of the vehicle and hands over the Trackyo device to the driver of that vehicle. Once scanned, the device will have a unique ID mapped along with the vehicle number.
As long as the vehicle is inside the community, the device will monitor the driving patterns of the vehicles, track its speed and location. It then gives audio visual alerts to the driver in case there is a violation of rules. And if the driver ignores the violations, a message is passed on to a nearby vehicle and the security division, so that any potential threat can be avoided.
In case of an accident, the security guard can instantly connect with emergency service providers like an ambulance, a police station or a fire truck closest to the area with just a click of a button. When the vehicle leaves the society, the device is then handed back to security at the exit point.
In case of vehicles dedicated to transporting residents from one block to another, Trackyo will integrate the system within the vehicle itself. This will be then monitored by the administration division of that society.
In terms of pricing, Trackyo has two types of offerings. The product itself can be purchased at a price of Rs 2,850 per vehicle. The other option is to rent the device to gated societies for Rs 150 per vehicle per month for two years.
Trackyo will start a commercial pilot trial in Hyderabad in June. It then plans to commercially launch its services in August this year.
Trackyo, incubated by T-Hub and AutoNebula - an incubator for connected vehicle startups - has collaborated with AT-Lead, a company that works on drones manufacturing and UAV implementations to develop solutions and will be raising funds from both AutoNebula and AT-Lead within the next 45 days.
"Our framework is capable of reducing the traffic violations like over speeding, reckless driving behaviours, parking violations by 75% within three months of implementation at the site", Yash said.
Image: Real Time Mobile Tracking
This article has been produced with inputs from T Hub as a part of a partner program.