Karan Chavan, Ph.D.

The Consortium — four companies, one loop

Build log — nine designed, five executed

Stage 03 — Current

ARYA-N Kayak Platform 🇮🇳

Coimbatore, India — live trials

Advanced kayak hull fitted with full ARYA-N autonomy. No rudder, no submerged prop. Rated to move 500 kg loads, satellite-connected, running real missions in public waters now.

Stage 02

Inflatable Catamaran 🇮🇳

Mula-Mutha River, Pune — first float, hardest water

Deployed straight into real-world conditions on a flowing, polluted river instead of a test tank. Surviving failure conditions on day one shaped every design decision since.

Stage 01

First Autonomy CANADA

Waterloo, Canada — TBDC & Velocity incubator

Full engineering pass — the prototype where the platform first navigated on its own rather than being driven, turning a working boat into a working robot.

Stage 01 — Victoria Park Lake, Waterloo: first autonomous float CANADA

Pilot sites — planned, live, and past

FireShield — the same rigor, applied to wildfire

A related initiative under the Droplet umbrella: a tiered, autonomous wildfire suppression system engineered against the Canadian Forest Fire Behaviour Prediction System's own published spread-rate classes — not marketing claims. CANADA

Two tiers: continuous ground-fed suppression (AeroSweep units, 20 L/min, tethered) and autonomous aerial response (AEROIGNIS units, 25 min endurance, 10 km range). Built on LCES — the same safety discipline wildland crews already operate by. The system explicitly hands head-fire response to conventional air tankers where physics — not resourcing — makes that the honest boundary.

Reference diagram — team composition, ground rig layout, and standoff positioning for a live flank/rear deployment

National Biomass Mobilization Biopolicy CANADA

Canada's forest floor accumulates biomass that currently has exactly two fates: it rots slowly, or fuels the next wildfire. This policy prices it instead — $250–300 CAD per tonne, paid to whoever collects it, funded through EI and pension claimants fulfilling part of their claim as a service requirement (3 hrs/day, 4 days/week), plus open public participation.

Order-of-magnitude check: in an average fire year, ~51 TWh of biomass energy is lost to combustion — ~54% of Canada's entire nuclear fleet output (~95 TWh/yr). In 2023's record fire year, it was ~296 TWh — roughly 3× nuclear. Compared against $60–70B+ in committed nuclear capex (Ontario refurbishment + SMRs).

Swachh Bharat Rojgar Yojana 🇮🇳

A proposal, not yet policy: turning unpaid civic cleanup labour (shramdaan) into paid employment — funded from money already sitting inside India's sanitation budgets, not new taxation.

Proposed rate: ₹5,000/tonne collected, or a flat ₹250/hr, capped at 3 hours/day so income spreads across more participants. Paid via Direct Benefit Transfer within 48 hours, verified through geo-tagged photos, depot weight verification, and supervisor sign-off.