Every Indian city knows the same sad sight: a lake choked with floating plastic, cleaned in a big campaign, and dirty again within weeks. The problem was never a lack of effort — it was a lack of frequency. Nobody can afford to put people on the water every single day. A Hyderabad company called Eunoia Innovations thinks a robot should do the daily rounds instead, and it has built a whole family of unmanned boats to prove it.
Eunoia Innovations, based in Hyderabad, builds autonomous marine robots and unmanned surface vessels for cleaning, surveying and guarding India’s waterways. Its flagship is the Aqua Skimmer, which the company describes as India’s first indigenous Automated Surface Vessel for water clean-up: an electric-powered boat that scoops up floating trash, monitors water quality in real time and collects samples as it works. The company says the vessel is remotely operated within a 3-kilometre range and can collect 150 kilograms of trash, and that a fully autonomous version is now under development.
The Aqua Skimmer exists because almost nothing for marine robotics was available off the shelf in India. The company says it designed the hull, the propulsion, the trash-collection system and the electronics from scratch, engineering them to survive exactly what Indian water bodies throw at a boat: algae, floating debris, silt and varying water depths. Autonomous navigation on water, the company notes, is far harder than on land, because the obstacles themselves move with the current — which is why its vessels are built around a vision-and-sensor-based Autonomous Navigation System that lets them detect obstacles and operate without a human pilot.
Eunoia did not start in a boardroom. The company was founded in 2021 by students at Hyderabad Institute of Technology and Management who felt, first-hand, how badly the city’s water bodies needed cleaning. Their remotely controlled Aqua Skimmer won first prize in the Microsoft Imagine Cup’s Earth category in 2021, and that win convinced the team to turn the project into a company. Encouraged by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and the Administrative Staff College of India, the product secured Rs 20 lakh in funding for a pilot project in Warangal, and a patent has been published on the design. Today the company is led by CEO Alankar Achadian, CTO Anjali Verma, COO Aashish Sharma and chief naval architect E Deepak Cheran, and is backed by IIT Kanpur’s SIIC, ISB D-Labs, T-Hub AIC, T-Works and other incubators.
The boats are already working, not waiting in a lab. The company says its vessels have been deployed across Telangana, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, including an exercise with the Indian Army on the Gomti River. Its devices in Jodhpur are operating daily to remove recurring lake waste, the Aqua Skimmer was showcased at Kolkata Climate Week, and the company counts the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, the Territorial Army and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation among the organisations it has worked with. One early pilot, the company says, told the whole story: on a Hyderabad lake, trash was piling up in a corner that conventional municipal machinery simply could not reach because of its size — and the Aqua Skimmer manoeuvred into that pocket and cleared it.
Cleaning is only one of three missions. Eunoia has also delivered an unmanned survey vessel for hydrography to the Indian Maritime University and the Inland Waterways Authority of India — its first commercial tender — which the company says was designed and developed completely indigenously, with zero Chinese components, within six months, making it India’s first USV for hydrographic surveys. Alongside it, the AquaScanner survey vessel with RTK-GNSS positioning is in development, and the Sentinel-M defence surveillance vessel is in the concept stage, extending the same autonomy and navigation stack into surveillance and patrol applications.
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The roadmap runs in every direction at once: scaling the fully autonomous Aqua Skimmer so it can work with no human operator at all, building a bigger version with larger collection capacity and range for bigger lakes, rivers and coastal stretches, growing the survey-vessel line for ports, inland waterways and research institutions, and developing a dedicated defence USV for maritime security. Longer term, the company is looking at exports to other developing countries facing the same polluted-water challenge — because a boat proven in India’s shallow, silty, algae-heavy water bodies, the company says, travels well anywhere the same problem exists.
That is the quiet ambition at the heart of Eunoia: not a single heroic clean-up, but a daily, unglamorous routine — boats on the water every day, the way garbage trucks work the streets — turning India’s lakes and rivers from problems that get cleaned once into water bodies that stay clean.
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