KNUST Aerospace Engineering Students Develop AI Drone to Tackle Illegal Mining
A group of final-year Aerospace Engineering students at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, has designed and built an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drone capable of detecting illegal mining activities, locally known as “galamsey.”
The innovation comes at a time when Ghana continues to grapple with the environmental and socio-economic damage caused by unregulated mining. The students’ creation aims to provide a technological boost to anti-galamsey operations by using aerial surveillance and AI-based image analysis.
Equipped with a high-resolution camera, the drone is linked to an AI model that enables it to capture aerial images over suspected mining areas. The system can classify the images to identify individuals, mining equipment, and precise locations of operations, providing valuable intelligence to authorities.
Detailing the hardware design, team member Samuel Fikayo Jegede explained,
“The drone has a flight controller, which acts as the brain of the system, connected to a software called Mission Planner to calibrate the motors. It also includes a transmitter to power the motors, a Raspberry Pi board as the computing hub, radio telemetry for measuring parameters in flight, and a GPS module for real-time location tracking.”
According to Emmanuel Hope Dagbui, the team selected the Raspberry Pi due to its flexibility for integrating their AI model.
“We used Visual Studio Code as our coding environment and Python to train and fine-tune the AI model,” he said.
The project was supervised by Dr. Faisla W. Adams and undertaken by Kizito Jortuotey, Samuel Fikayo Jegede, Cosmos Yorm Nquarshie-Kpekpena, Perey Asgadunga, Emmanuel Selasie Akuaku, Stephen Eshun Kyere, Kirk Thompson, Caleb Atewen Acheampong, and Jacob Nii Adotey Garshong.
By combining aerospace engineering with AI, the team hopes their work will serve as a model for how technology can play a pivotal role in addressing one of Ghana’s most pressing environmental challenges.