DROGGO
India's terrain is brutal. Jungles, mountains, floodplains, border zones where GPS is unreliable and human access is dangerous. DROGGO is our research program to build an unmanned ground vehicle that can operate in those conditions autonomously — no pilot, no remote control, no connectivity required.
An autonomous ground vehicle built for India's hardest environments.
DROGGO is not a remote-controlled vehicle. The goal is full autonomy — a vehicle that receives a mission objective and executes it without a human operator watching and controlling every movement. It plans its own path, avoids obstacles, and navigates using onboard sensors even when GPS is unavailable or being jammed.
The program is named for the operational context it is designed for: dangerous ground. Places where sending a person is too risky, too slow, or physically impossible. Border terrain. Post-disaster zones. Areas contaminated or under threat.
We are not there yet. The current prototype has completed its first outdoor field test, confirming basic mobility and camera operation. Autonomous navigation is the next milestone. We document where we are honestly because credibility matters more than impression management.
India's ground terrain is one of the most demanding operating environments on earth.
India shares land borders with six countries. Several of those borders pass through the Himalayas, dense jungle, high-altitude passes, and remote valleys where permanent surveillance is physically impossible and rotating human patrols is dangerous and expensive. The Northeast alone — where T.R.I.N.E.T.R.A is based — has some of the most operationally complex terrain in the country.
Beyond borders, disaster response is a critical application. India faces cyclones, floods, earthquakes, and landslides regularly. Getting a ground vehicle into a disaster zone to survey conditions, locate survivors, or map accessible routes before sending in human responders is an obvious and urgent need.
DROGGO is our attempt to build a vehicle that can operate in these environments. Not as a finished product — as a research prototype that teaches us what works, what does not, and what the real engineering challenges are when theory meets Indian terrain.
Work on the autonomous
navigation milestone.
We need people who understand ROS, SLAM, computer vision, and embedded systems. No salary currently. Real hardware, real outdoor testing, your name on the work.