Kolkata girl in Forbes 30 under 30 list | Fusion - WeRIndia

Sampriti Bhattacharyya, a 28 year old Kolkata girl has been featured in the Forbes’ top 30 most powerful young change agents of the world for her work in designing an underwater drone which can map ocean floors at places where GPS does not work.

Sampriti, a PhD scholar from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has designed an underwater drone that can map ocean floors at places where GPS does not work. She founded Hydroswarm. It is a startup which designs and sells small autonomous drones for ocean exploration and maritime big data. They make the drones in egg shapes and they are approximately the size of a football.

For her amazing work, Sampriti has been featured in the top 30 young agents of change of the world by Forbes. She hails from Kolkata and has also pursued her engineering degree from St. Thomas’ College of Engineering & Technology there. After that, she went to study aerospace engineering in Ohio State University and later she switched to robotics at MIT.

She found that there is no easy way to study the ocean floor which inspired her to create an underwater robot. At present, remotely operated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are used to explore the deep sea. However, they are very costly and too specific for missions. They cannot be used on a day-to-day basis underwater.

Sampriti wants to change this with Hydroswarm by developing drones which can roam oceans and collect data at the all times. These drones are capable of withstand a lot of pressure in ocean depths and are capable of covering 100 square meters in one hour. They are capable for mapping ocean topography by swimming across ocean floors and also study aquatic life.

In her plans to commercialize the drones, she joined a business programme at Harvard Business School.

She was one of the eight participants to reach finals of MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition and won $15,000.

Image Reference: TheBetterIndia