Kolkata: At 28, she has created an underwater drone that can map ocean floors and explore the deep sea, where even GPS doesn’t work. Kolkata girl Sampriti Bhattacharya’s invention — the Hydroswarm — has been patented and is quite a rage with the defence sector and oil giants.

What’s more, Forbes has featured her among the top 30 most powerful young change agents of the world. Sampriti, who left the city about seven years back for her masters, is now a PhD scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Hydroswarm was created as part of her research thesis. “Underwater navigation has been a reality for many years but for advanced searches you need maps that are as refined as, say, the Google map. This is where my drone comes in. It can map the ocean, sitting on its bed, and you can zero in on the minutest objects, living or non-living.

You can even map underwater pollution with the help of this drone,” said Sampriti, who was in Kolkata for a short while and returned to the US on Thursday. A South Point alumnus, she studied engineering at St Thomas College and did her masters in aerospace engineering at Ohio State University before switching to robotics at MIT.

She told TOI that she always wanted to create an underwater robot because there was no easy way to study the ocean floor. The only option was the very expensive remotely operated underwater vehicles generally used to track warships.



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