IIT Guwahati researchers track 36,000 vehicles using drones and AI
Researchers at IIT Guwahati are using drones and AI to figure out how traffic really works on Indian roads.
By flying drones over a busy highway near Delhi, they tracked the movement of more than 36,000 vehicles, analyzing everything from traffic jams to vehicle speeds.
Their findings were published in the International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research.
New ML models predict vehicle speeds
The team discovered that as roads get crowded, the gaps between vehicles shrink, but in heavy jams, those gaps actually grow again, a pattern traditional models often miss.
Using these insights, they built new machine learning models that better estimate a range of possible vehicle speeds in India's unpredictable traffic.
The goal? Smarter road design and traffic management that actually fits real-life conditions here.