EPICS in IEEE: The Sky’s the Limit for “SkyPulse” Technology

Thanks to the IoT and satellite-based environmental intelligence system they designed, an EPICS in
IEEE student team in India helps provide local residents with invaluable real-time weather insights.

With a population of over 12 million, the city of Bengaluru, India has struggled with the problems of increasingly frequent extreme weather events as well as air pollution, flooding, and other environmental hazards.  Sadly, the lack of public access to timely information on these events has left many local residents dangerously unprepared to proactively protect their health, economy, and quality of life.  But “SkyPulse” technology – an EPICS in IEEE-driven innovation that leverages IoT sensors and satellite data to deliver real-time weather and environmental insights, created by students within the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at BMS Institute of Technology and Management’s (BMSIT) in Bengaluru – aims to empower community members to make informed decisions regarding disaster preparedness, farming, public health, and education.

“SkyPulse offers a hyperlocal environmental intelligence and early-warning system for dense urban and peri-urban environments by integrating real-time satellite reception with IoT-based ground sensors,” shared SkyPulse Project Co-Lead Nitish K S, a third-year student at BMSIT.  Fellow team members include Project Co-Lead Tarun Patil (Finance Manager), Sri Srujan Hari T (Technical Lead), and Harshitha K V (Community Liaison), faculty mentor Dr. Anitha V R., and Bengaluru-based NGO partner Green Circle, which is actively involved in lake rejuvenation, city-wide awareness campaigns regarding deteriorating environmental conditions, and sustainability initiatives.  The team is also affiliated with IEEE’s Communications Society and IEEE’s Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) Student Branch at BMSIT.  

Filling a Forecasting Gap
While most global and national weather forecast models in their area cover broad trends over large regions, they’re unable to track microclimates and local weather/environmental issues that could significantly impact community residents.

“SkyPulse addresses this gap by fusing localized satellite data with dense, on-ground IoT sensing to deliver near-real-time, neighborhood-level environmental intelligence,” explained Nitish of a system that encompasses a POLARIS satellite reception and tracking system, a LUMOS IoT-based ground sensor network, and a HELIOS cloud-integrated web dashboard for data analysis and community access. “This enables more accurate detection of intense rainfall, flood-prone conditions, heat stress, and air-quality spikes – all information that’s critical for early warnings, urban planning, and community preparedness. By making advanced environmental monitoring low-cost, decentralized, and accessible,” he said, “SkyPulse empowers local citizens, NGOs, and institutions to shift from reactive responses to proactive, data-driven urban resilience.”

According to Nitish, one of the project’s biggest challenges was balancing technical ambition with real-world deployability.

“For example, we had to rethink the original locations of our 16 weather-station sensor nodes to reliably link everything back to the satellite ground-station gateway, and we had to revisit torque calculations, mechanical limits, and Doppler correction when designing a tracking system for our ground station,” Nitish said. “We also had to ensure that the system didn’t feel intimidating to non-technical community stakeholders, which we accomplished by working closely with our NGO partner to simplify dashboards, add clear contextual explanations, and plan hands-on training sessions. Most of our hiccups were infrastructure-related,” he said, “but with an able team, iterative debugging, and a healthy supply of coffee, we managed to solve them without dialing down our ambitions.”

Promoting Data-Driven Urban Resilience
Since the system became operational, the team has been thrilled with its results.

“So far, SkyPulse has successfully demonstrated live satellite data reception of visible and infrared spin scan radiometer (VISSR) and high-resolution picture transmission (HRPT) imagery,” Nitish said. “As part of our testing phase, we were able to track and predict Cyclone Ditwah in late November 2025 as well as a deep depression event that eventually brought rainfall to the city, serving as strong validation of both our reception chain and data-processing pipeline.”

Nitish confirmed that the project also helped team members build skills on many levels.

“On the technical side, we gained hands-on experience with RF systems, satellite communications, IoT networking, embedded firmware development, geographic information systems (GIS), and machine learning,” Nitish said. “We also built soft skills in project and financial management, interdisciplinary teamwork, stakeholder communication, and the translation of complex engineering concepts into community-relevant and actionable insights.”

Through their close partnership with NGOs and local stakeholders, the team also learned the important lesson that engineering decisions don’t exist in isolation. “Design choices directly influence usability, trust, and long-term sustainability, and learning to balance technical excellence with human-centered design became one of the most valuable outcomes of the project”, Nitish said.

As the team continues transitioning their system from controlled testing to sustained, real-world data acquisition, “we hope that SkyPulse will prove that city-scale environmental intelligence can be built and owned locally, without waiting for national agencies or delayed datasets,” Nitish said of their hopes for the technology. “We want SkyPulse to be used by NGOs to plan lake clean-up campaigns, by campuses to adjust outdoor activity schedules, and by educators to teach climate science using live, local data instead of abstract models.” In the longer term, they hope SkyPulse becomes a blueprint that other cities and groups can adapt using their own satellite visibility, sensors, and constraints. “If replicated widely,” Nitish shared, “this approach could quietly reshape how environmental monitoring is done — bottom-up, city-first, and community-aware, complementing global models rather than competing with them.”

Team members confirmed that they couldn’t be more grateful to EPICS in IEEE for the opportunity to have this impact.

“EPICS in IEEE gave us the freedom to pursue engineering that doesn’t fit neatly into a lab experiment or a semester timeline,” Nitish said.  “The funding allowed us to take risks and iterate through failures while staying accountable to a community use case rather than just a demo.  What sets EPICS apart is that it doesn’t just ask “Does this work?” but rather “Who does this work for, and why does it matter?” – a shift in approach that fundamentally changed how we designed SkyPulse.”

“Ultimately, EPICS in IEEE is an opportunity to experience engineering in its most honest form — messy, interdisciplinary, and deeply human,” Nitish concluded of the EPICS program.  “You don’t just leave with technical skills, you leave understanding how technology earns trust, how impact is sustained, and how engineers can operate responsibly in the real world.”

This EPICS in IEEE project was funded by the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), an EPICS in IEEE partner.