5 AI Tools Indian Students Built to Tackle Crop Pests, Blind Navigation & Newborn Care

On 17 February 2026, you could walk into Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi and see a robotic dog drawing a crowd at a university stall. The robot was called Orion, and the demo looked slick enough to travel far beyond the expo floor.

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And it did. Viewers soon identified the model as Unitree Go2, a commercially available robot made by China’s Unitree Robotics, and the clip turned into a credibility storm. By the end of the day, Galgotias University was asked to vacate its stall at the India AI Impact Summit.

If you care about where India’s AI story is heading, this moment gives you a useful lens. You can look past the hype and ask a simpler question: what does student innovation look like when it begins with a clear problem and ends with something people can actually use?

Here are five projects that answer that question with work you can trace, test, and understand.

1) HeritageLens: When a QR code becomes a local guide in Lucknow

You stand near Lucknow’s Rumi Darwaza and you want more than a photo. You want context, stories, and the kind of detail that makes a place feel lived-in rather than scanned-and-done.

A team of 30 first-year BTech students at Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University (AKTU) built ‘HeritageLens’, an AI-based mobile app designed for exactly this moment. You scan a QR code at a heritage site, and the app opens a guided experience with narratives in Hindi and English. It also shares practical information, including entry prices and nearby dining options.

The design decision that changes usability is the offline mode. You can still access the content even when mobile data drops, which happens often in crowded tourist zones.

The team built the app during a 10-week training programme called Kalam Udbhav at AKTU’s Centre of Advanced Studies. The result feels like a small, useful bridge between a city’s past and your present-day curiosity.

2) A butterfly-shaped flying robot that spots sugarcane disease early

If you have ever seen a sugarcane field up close, you know how hard it is to inspect plant by plant. The crop grows tall and dense, and infections can begin deep inside where the eye does not reach easily.

Researchers from SGSITS, Indore and Delhi Technological University (DTU) developed an AI-powered flying robot with a butterfly-inspired structure to move through these tight spaces. It captures close images of leaves, detects diseases such as red rot, smut, wilt, and ratoon stunting, and uses GPS tagging to mark the precise location of infected plants.

That location pin can change how you treat the crop. You can head straight to the affected patch, respond early, and avoid spraying an entire field when only a section needs attention.

The robot connects its observations to a web and mobile platform that builds a digital field map with heat maps, alerts, and trends. The project has filed a patent and has backing through the ASPIRE scheme under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

3) Perceivia: Smart glasses that turn surroundings into sound and feedback

Independent movement is a constant negotiation when you cannot rely on vision. A single obstacle can become a serious risk, and unfamiliar routes can feel like a daily test.

Tushar Shaw, a second-year engineering student at Scaler School of Technology in Bengaluru, built ‘Perceivia’, a pair of AI-powered smart glasses designed to support navigation for people with visual impairment. The system uses sensors and AI-based interpretation to recognise objects and offer guidance through audio cues and vibration feedback.

The point is not novelty. The point is confidence, because a clearer read of what lies ahead can make a commute, a corridor, or a street crossing feel more manageable.

Perceivia was named among the national winners of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow 2025, and the winning teams received incubation support at IIT Delhi. That support is typically where early prototypes get stress-tested, refined, and pushed closer to real-world adoption.

4) A phone-camera tool for newborn jaundice screening

Newborn jaundice often appears in the first week of life, and families usually spot it through changes in a baby’s skin colour. The next steps depend on access, timing, and whether a screening tool is available nearby.

Anshumaan Karna, a third-year computer science student at IIIT Naya Raipur, developed a smartphone application that uses AI to analyse skin images and estimate bilirubin levels non-invasively for neonatal jaundice screening.

He also developed a 3D-printed colour card fixture to standardise image capture. This detail matters because camera-based screening can go wrong when lighting varies, photos shift, or colours get misread.

The prototype work was developed during a research internship at IIT Kharagpur’s Centre of Excellence in Affordable Healthcare under the guidance of Dr Debanjan Das, and the prototype has been under review. Tools in this space carry high responsibility, so careful validation becomes part of the innovation story, not an optional extra.

5) CodeVaani: A multilingual, voice-based coding assistant built at IIT Bombay

You can understand logic and still feel blocked by language. Many students reach that wall when programming education assumes English fluency and text-heavy learning.

CodeVaani was built to reduce that barrier. It is a multilingual, speech-driven assistant for understanding code built into ‘Bodhitree’, a learning management system developed at IIT Bombay. 

You can ask a programming question by voice in your native language, the system transcribes and refines it using a code-aware step, and it generates an answer through a code model. The response comes back in text and audio, which supports learners who do better with listening than reading.

In a study with 28 beginner programmers, CodeVaani achieved 75% response accuracy, and over 80% of participants rated the experience positively. The core idea stays simple: you do not have to translate your thinking into textbook English before you ask for help. You speak the question the way you naturally say it, and you get an explanation you can act on straight away.

Why these five projects matter right now

The Galgotias controversy is not a referendum on Indian student talent. It is a reminder that visibility creates pressure, and pressure creates shortcuts.

These five examples show a different rhythm: problem-first building, transparent attribution, and supporting evidence in reporting or research. They also span very different realities, from a tourist scanning a QR code to a farmer trying to save a crop, from a visually impaired person seeking independence to a parent worried about a newborn.

India’s AI story will be shaped by work that holds up under questions. That work already exists on campuses. It deserves attention for what it does, who it helps, and how honestly it is presented.

Sources 

• 'India tells university to leave AI summit after presenting Chinese robot as its own, sources say': by Reuters, Published on 18 February 2026

• 'India boots a private university from an AI summit over a robot dog controversy': by Associated Press, Published on 18 February 2026

• 'AI Summit 2026 LIVE Updates: Galgotia's University staff and officials leave expo amid controversy over robodog': by Mint, Published on 18 February 2026

• 'AKTU students devise AI-based app for virtual tour of city': by The Times of India, Published on 9 November 2025

• 'Now, AI-based flying robot to help sugarcane farmers pest infections': by The Times of India, Published on 12 February 2026

• 'Bengaluru Student’s AI-powered Innovation: Smart Glasses to Empower the Visually Impaired': by Samsung Newsroom India, Published on 12 November 2025

• 'How a Bengaluru 2nd-year engineering student built a navigation device for the blind and won a national Samsung award': by The Economic Times, Published on 3 December 2025

• 'IIIT-Naya Raipur student develops AI App to detect neonatal jaundice, prototype under review at IIT-Kharagpur': by The Times of India, Published on 8 July 2025

• 'IIIT-NR student’s app to predict neonatal jaundice non-invasively': by ET HealthWorld (The Economic Times), Published on 11 July 2025

• 'CodeVaani: A Multilingual, Voice-Based Code Learning Assistant': by arXiv, Published on 8 October 2025