Maybe just hold on to it. OK, very good morning to everyone. My name is Yaldanand. I go by Yalu for short. And today I'm excited to talk about a personal research project of mine. This is something I'm curious about, and it's still in a very experimental stage. And the idea is, can we map in digital twins for autonomous navigation in the real world? A little bit about myself before I begin. As Marco mentioned, I'm a software engineer at the Open Robotics team at intrinsic. And I helped to develop, maintain, release several core packages in ROS2 as well as OpenRM. And yes, it's really my privilege to be here today to talk about my interests. Before I start, can I get a show of hands? How many of us here have worked with mobile robots before or even better done any kind of mapping or navigation? Oh, wow, that's a lot of people. OK, OK. So I'll try not to smoke as much, try to be factual. Yeah, let's get it. So today I'll be talking about a few things. We'll start with a high-level overview of what autonomous navigation is and the role of mapping in this process. Some of the practical challenges with mapping in the real world. And this concept of digital twins, and how do we generate them and how do we build them? And then we'll get into mapping and navigation, and then we'll talk about some pitfalls I've observed along the way. So it sounds like most people here already know what autonomous navigation is, but for the sake of completeness. In robotics or self-driving, autonomous navigation is basically the process of getting an agent to move from one point to another, where your only input is telling it where you need it to go or arrive at. And the agent is able to figure out how to get there. And along the way, it's avoiding obstacles. It's finding the most optimal path to get there. And it's respecting certain constraints you give it, how fast it can go, how fast it can pair, et cetera. So there's several components that go into autonomous navigation. The first is you need an agent. And typically, this agent needs to be able to sense the world around it. This is in the form of, let's talk about mobile robots for today. And sensors come in a variety of forms. You have lidars, cameras, stereo cameras, et cetera. And these help the agent develop an understanding of the world around it. We have our eyes, stereo vision that helps us perceive the world. We also can infer depth from this. So similarly, in robotics, we have sensors that can do the same. The second is we need a map. This is generally true for indoor navigation. We need a datum to help the agent know where it is in space and how it can navigate around the space. So a map is basically a representation of the world that the agent is moving around in. And the next important component is localization. So once we have this map or this representation of the world, an important part of navigation is for the agent to figure out where it currently is in this representation of the world. And this process is called localization, or it's able to infer where it is right now, given this representation of the world. And finally, there's a lot of planning and control that goes into navigation. So once you give it a goal, it needs to plan a collision-free path to get to the destination. And the wheels have to move to get it to follow this path. And that's where the control also comes in. So I would say this is a very high-level basics of basic overview of what autonomous navigation is. So what's mapping here? I think we talked about it briefly. Mapping or commonly what's practiced is simultaneous localization and mapping or SNAP. And this is really solving the problem where we need to construct this digital representation of the world for this autonomous agent. And we need to do this while the space is originally unknown. So we just throw a robot in the space. It doesn't know anything about it. It needs to construct a representation, some representation that it can then use to firstly localize, to plan, and then navigate. And this typically relies on a combination of different sensors to perceive the world. So linears are quite popular in the field of robotics and self-driving cars. And these are basically usually laser-based cameras. And they shoot out a beam of certain frequency, a light wave, and then it reflects off the surface, comes back, can often tell you how far away that hit was. And sometimes we can also infer the intensity of the light that came back. So we're able to tell whether this is a solid surface, glass surface, shiny, matte, et cetera. So linears are getting really advanced these days. We can do 360 degrees cannon. So it's not just a single point that goes out. It rather shoots around in 360 degrees. And it has a field of view in both the vertical and horizontal domains. If I am used, inertial measurement units that keep track of the current kinematic state of the robot, how fast it's moving, how fast it's accelerating, et cetera. And there's cameras. And there's a whole bunch of cameras that range from monochromatic cameras to stereo vision to depth sensors, et cetera. And typically, the output of this mapping process is this representation of the world. It sounds pretty abstract, but from a practical standpoint, it's typically like two formats. The output is generated in. For 2D representations of the world, we use something called an occupancy grid. And that's what you see on the right-hand side here. You can think of it as a PNG image. And it's just grayscale. And if the pixel is black, it means there's an obstacle. If it's white, it means it's obstacle-free. And gray areas usually mean unexplored or uncertain. It's a very simple representation, but you can think of it as we generate a grid of the world. Imagine this 3D space. We just project it down at a certain height. So I choose this level, maybe one meter above the ground. And then I imagine I cut the plane of this room right now. And if you project that down, that's what this image looks like. So it's generated at a specific height from the ground. Another common storage format is 3D dense point clouds. So if you have sensors set up that can generate the 3D description of the environment with these 3D lidars or other kinds of sensors, you probably store it in the point cloud format. So it's just a whole bunch of 3D points that store. It can go up to millions or maybe tens of millions of points even. There's other forms I haven't mentioned here, but you can even do visual-based slab. And then in this case, you're storing key frames. Or say you're looking at this image right now. And then I want to store this corner of the table. Or I want to store certain key things that I see in this image. And this will typically be stored as a bag of words or something else. But those are some details that we can ignore for today. So as a robotics engineer, I've spent a lot of time working with mobile robots. And typically when we want to deploy a robot somewhere, it's based mappings, the first thing that you do. And personally, I've been very frustrated by this process because it requires you to manually drive around a robot, either tele-operating it or sometimes as a big enough robot, you have to ride the robot to drive it around the space and generate this representation of the world. And it takes time, especially in really, really large environments, something like this room can be done in a few minutes. But if you want to map this entire institute, for example, it's going to take a lot of time. And furthermore, if the layout changes, for example, we close off a certain section, we add new furniture, or something changes physically. You probably have to remap, which means you need to come down and do this process all over again. And so this kind of gave me this idea to explore, which was basically, can we map in simulation and then take the output of that and then run it directly in the digital world, in the physical world? And yeah, so if you're like me that plays a lot of video games, one reason I do that is, although I like the graphics in the real world, the gameplay often isn't as fun. And I feel the same way with mapping, right? It's something that's annoying in the physical world, but I think the gameplay can be improved in simulation. And this is where gazebo comes in, gazebo is another open source tool that we distribute. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with it. It's a simulator, it's a physics-based simulator that does physics, rendering, it has a whole bunch of plugins that can try to emulate the physical world as closely as possible. And we call this high fidelity simulation. So you're not just able to reproduce visuals from the world, but also interactions, contact forces, and various other physics elements. So how does gazebo help? So like I mentioned, it's a simulator. And with simulators, you can define a rate at which the simulator can run. And there are some constraints, of course, depending on the hardware that you have. But you can typically run the simulated world at a faster rate than the real world. So I can say, you run the simulation at 10 times real time, real time rate. So if I'm sending a command to move the robot for one second, it might move the robot as if it was getting that command for 10 seconds in simulation. So you can move the robot faster. And if we can move the robot faster, it means theoretically we should be able to map faster, if we're able to process all that data at this higher rate. And there's some other benefits, too. Like I said, we can replicate the physics in simulation. And we can build really, sorry, specifically why gazebo is because we can generate these very realistic worlds, right? There's a cool talk I've linked here by my colleague, Cole, who talks about photorealistic simulations. So how can we build simulation environments that look very similar to the real world? Another cool part about gazebo, it has all of these plugins. A plugin, you can think of it as basically a component that emulates a physical system. So there's a lot of model plugins that emulate various kinds of sensors. So in this case, we're interested in Lidar sensors. And so there's some images here of Lidar sensors in gazebo. You can see the rays hitting an object and detecting an obstacle. And the cool thing is these sensor plugins, they're very customizable. You can define a type of noise that you want. This sensor has a Gaussian noise. Has this mean, this standard deviation, which you can typically find in a data sheet. So that's really important because you don't want to get super accurate results from this simulation, right? Because no sensor is that accurate in the real world. So being able to model this noise really, really helps. And the cool part about gazebo is, like I said, you can, one challenge is dealing with environments that change. So in simulation, if we can quickly rebuild that simulation world, deploy the robot, do this mapping at this faster rate. I think that solves a lot of the annoyances that I talked about earlier. So what's my plan here? So this is the idea that came to mind and I started exploring. So can I build a photorealistic digital twin of a real environment? So this is, start with the gazebo representation of a space that actually exists. Can I run all my SLAM algorithms and ROS nodes and all of that with the data from the simulation? So the sensors from the simulation produce data. I'm using that data to generate this map. And I take this map, which is the occupancy grid that I talked about before, and then I give it to a real robot and then have the real robot move in the real space. So this is kind of the research question that I'm trying to explore here. So the first question you may have is, okay, so how do I build these digital worlds quickly? And a tool that I wanna share is something called RMF traffic editor. So this comes from the OpenRMF project that Marco alluded to earlier. And this is a great tool. It helps you very quickly build 3D environments. The only input you need is a 2D floor plan. So you start off with a floor plan, such as a PNG image you can download from the building website or get it from your landlord, I don't know. And then this tool lets you annotate this 2D floor plan. So you're basically annotating features that you've seen the floor plan. Here's where a wall is, here's where a door is, et cetera. And then you're very easily able to take this annotated floor plan and quickly generate a 3D environment that has all the physics and everything in visible. And this slide kind of covers some of the features of traffic editor. So you can, there are utilities to add walls. So the first gift here, we're sort of highlighting the walls in the floor plan. And second gift, we're adding doors. We support different kinds of doors from swing, sliding, and telescopic. Most of the kinds that we've seen at least in Singapore. You can tell, you can annotate where the floor is. You can even give different textures to floors. Like this is a marble floor, this is a carpeted floor, et cetera. And these models, that's the most important part because we need to have these models that we see in the real world. So there's very quick ways to drag and drop these thumbnails of models that will eventually get generated as the physical model. I won't go into too many details. So how to use traffic editor. We've done a Rosconn workshop last November, last October. There are some slides from that workshop that go into more details of how to use this tool. And we also have documentation linked here. So that's something we're checking out later. So once you have this annotated floor plan, we have another tool called building map generator. And this takes the annotated file. It's a YAML file. And then it basically auto-generates your Xebo file format, which is a .world file. So it's just as simple as running the script. What we typically do is we even automate running the script. When we build a map file, we have some hooks that will automatically run the script. So it's a very seamless process.  And then you save, you build, and then you can immediately open this 3D world in simulation. So that's what I did here. So this is a floor plan of our office in Singapore and Wannong. And I started with a floor plan. I took some pictures of the real world. And then using my limited imagination, I tried to reproduce or annotate that floor plan with the different elements. And here are the results, right? So I'd love to get a feedback on this. And all of this is open source, by the way. It's in our RMF demo. So possibly there's a link to that later. But I'd love to get a feedback on this on how close you think it is to some of the images. It's hard to tell now if you haven't been to our office. But to me, I think it's pretty close. Maybe I'm biased. All right, so the next thing is, okay, we have this digital world. How can we now generate that map? So the cool thing about Ross and Gazebo is whatever code that you want to run on the real robot, you can run in simulation. There's no differences. Maybe you just have to say use the time for my computer or use the time for my simulation instead. But rest of the code, everything's the same. It's the same nodes, same logic. It's getting the data and that same topic. So everything's the same. So it's not like this is just a visual simulation. And then when you have to run something in the real world, that's a completely different code. It's not, it's the same code. So whatever code I would use to map the real world, I'm using the same nodes, the same launch files here to start up these different nodes that I need for mapping, right? And but before I can do that, I need to spawn this robot in simulation. There's a couple of tweaks I make to benefit from simulation. So firstly, I have to make sure that the LiDAR model in simulation is comparable to the one in the real world. But then I also do some hacks, some cheat codes. I increased the range of the LiDAR because my real robot has a range of maybe 12 meters. And then that means if I want to map a wall that's beyond 12 meters, I have to drive closer to that wall. But in simulation, I can just say, no, my LiDAR, it has the same noise, but then it can actually hit 20 meters or 100 meters ahead. So that's really cool. I have to drive lesser now in simulation. So that's one of these hacks that I do. I also increased the field of view. Maybe my real LiDAR has a, I don't know, 270 minus 270 field of horizontal field of view in degrees. So in simulation, I can just say, I have a 360 degree LiDAR. Yeah, I'm sure LiDAR manufacturers hate this, but that's one quick tip that I just wanted to share. And then the most important thing here is I need to keep the LiDAR at the same height as it is on my physical robot. So I mentioned that the way this 2D slam works is we cut a plane across a certain height of the 3D wall and we project that down. So I want to make sure that my LiDAR in simulation is at the same height as the LiDAR in the real robot. So that's just adjusting some of the model values to make it at the same height.  And saving the map again, it's just saving that occupancy grid. So here's like a cool video montage. I should have had it playing while I was explaining, but since it's a robot that you can spawn in simulation, so all the blue lines you see are the LiDAR hits. And as you can see, I've cheated there with using a longer range LiDAR and create a horizontal field of view. So I can map really fast though, right? And I'm probably moving the robot at a much faster rate too. So I'm done. And that's the map that gets generated, right? Yeah? Yeah. You have no prediction on the wall depending on the type of material, right? Yeah. That's a great question. So as part of the model description, you can specify what are the friction parameters of the contact points. So there is a certain representation of this robot, right? And it has wheels. And so depending on the physics engine, we use ODE, which is an open source physics engine. You can give it certain contact parameters. Like this is the coefficient of static friction in a dynamic friction. There are some other contact parameters that you can actually data continuing on. So how good is this map, right? So the image on the right side is the one I got from the simulation. And the image on the left side is what I generated with a physical robot in the real space. So I think it's pretty close. Obviously, the real robot has a bit more noise. So maybe I didn't model the noise as well as I should have. And maybe there's a bit more uncertainty in certain areas and the lidar hits were much cleaner in the simulation. But that's fine. Even when you drive in the real world, the real world is never gonna be the same as when you map it. It's always gonna be humans walking around. There's gonna be some differences. So we rely on this localization a lot to counteract some of these differences that we see to still maintain an understanding of where we are right now. So I think it's not bad. I think it's not bad. Okay, so the proof is in the pudding. Does it really work? I'm gonna play this video. And what's happening in this video here is this camera feed on the bottom left is from the camera mounted on the real robot. I sent the map to the real robot and then we're running the navigation status. This is navigation two running. And the first thing you need to do is localize the robot. So you have to give it some help.  So I kind of know where it is in space and then I kind of localize it. You can see a whole bunch of green dots around it. So this is a probabilistic localization we do with AMCL. There's a initial belief of where we are and eventually that belief updates. As the robot moves around the algorithm updates to firm up its understanding of where the robot is. So as the robot moves, you see that those green points kind of converge to strengthen the belief of where the robot is in this world. So I'll play the video. At some point I had the thought of also opening up the digital, the twin to kind of get a cool side-by-side of the real camera feed and the digital twin. All right, just play the video. So this is the robot that's initially localized. I give it a few goals to see if it can move. Just waiting for that belief and see if we have the camera. And then I give it some goals that are initially nearby to see if things work. That was pretty surprising work. And then give it a few other goals. So here's a robot autonomously navigating in the real world with that map that regenerated in simulation. And this is that digital world that we use for simulation. So we're right now in this kind of corridor that's facing this country here and then giving it other goals. I thought the shower was pretty cool. Yeah, here's a cooler image of that localization. So there's a lot of line art noise. So it doesn't know where it is, but then it immediately localizes. You can see that line art is the AMTL immediately snapping and the robot figures out where it is. And then it's able to try it and see that my desk in the office. So again, this is like very early work on this concept that's personal to me and I've been trying to explore. And I think that's great potential. A lot of things that can be good, of course. And I'm really hoping to talk to more people here who had experience with mapping and find ways we can make this part of Ross even. How are we at time? We have time for a couple more slides. Okay, yeah. This isn't the Oscars. They start playing the music in the walk-up. Yeah, so a couple of gotchas I experienced during this process. Obviously, one of the big limitations is the model. So to build this digital twin, you need to have models that exist in the real world. So that takes effort. Honestly, that's the most challenging part of this process. But the team at Open Robotics and even the community has contributed a lot of models. And we host a lot of these models on fuel. That's like our drop box for models. There's a whole bunch of everything that I used to build the digital twins out there. So that's a great place to start. And if you end up building models and you want to contribute, this is why you should help a lot of them. So others can also use them. It's on nuances, right? So, because even with a physics engine, sorry, it runs a physics engine and physics is important for sensors. So one thing I realized was initially when I used a certain GPU model, sorry, I used a certain LiDAR model in simulation, I was using this type called ray. And I found out later that it just uses your CPU alone to figure out where the ray hits. Each of these lines are kind of raised on laser beams that emanate from the sensor. And it hits some point in the world, right? So with this type of sensor, I realized that, oh, it's actually just hitting the collision meshes of the models. So every model you can think of it as having two components. It has a collision component. So collision is also mesh. There's two different meshes for every model. There's a collision mesh and then there's a visual mesh. The visual mesh helps you render what it looks like. The collision mesh, it can be the same as the visual mesh, but something that we do to improve the performance of our simulation is we use these simplistic collision meshes. These are like primitives, they're just rectangles that kind of encompass the bounding box of the model. And this really, really helps speed up simulation. And in the RMF project, we're simulating really big world. So this is important to do. And I realized that actually, oh, our technical artists helped us craft these really nice collision meshes. But it's actually a problem with this type of plugin because the rays just hit the collision mesh. And then if you map with this, you end up with like these kind of boxes. This box here is this back of this chair. That's actually the collision mesh. So it's not gonna be accurate. So the robot could not localize in this kind of map. All I had to do was change that one line. It's from ray to GPU on the score ray, right? And now it's using my GPU. And with GPU, we're able to do all kinds of fancy ray casting. And now you can see that the rays actually penetrate the collision mesh and they're hitting the visual mesh. So that helps generate the more accurate representation of the world. And yeah, now I'm at the end of my talk and I'm happy to take any questions. I'll just leave this playing. Yeah, please go ahead. So with that, do you have built a digital twin of the world? Is there some, what would happen if you use that digital twin slice it digitally and convert the mesh to resolve the slight mesh of the result directly into a up-to-date grid? Would that work? Instead of how would you see the simulation? Yeah, I think that would work. So if you export this entire digital world as a single mesh and then you take a slice of that mesh and somehow you generate an image from that view of the world, but the problem there is you're not accounting for the sensor noise. And that's the most important thing with mapping. But if you had a way to factor that in, that would be pretty cool. Oh, so because I'm new to this video, so I'm sorry, I'll be questioned in a little bit. That was a good question, yeah? Yeah, so the sensor noise does affect the output of the up-to-date grid. It definitely does, yeah. So if you look at the map that's generated from the real robot, right? So even these walls here, it's kind of a wavy line because the sensor has a certain noise. It can't be super confident about exactly where the laser hit. So there's always this noise that's important to model. And the goal is to do that in simulation. I think that's the challenging part. And the cool thing is because Evo has a way to model this kind of course. There's a question? Yeah, that's a question. Yeah, I'm just wondering like in the situation of a deployment, right? Why do you want a noisy map? Like if you can do a perfect 2D size, you get an ideal map. Will it be navigation step better even if there's noise in the real world? Yeah, the problem is your localization algorithm needs to be better in that case. If you have a very perfect slice of this opportunity grid, when you run your robot's navigation stack with that map, what you're doing essentially is you're getting live sensor data, right? The laser is actually hitting all these points in the world and you're getting a live sensor input. The goal is to take the sensor input and find out which part of the map does it actually match to, right? So if your model is super perfect but your sensor from the real robot has some noise, that localization is fighting extra hard to just snap to the right position. So ideally, if you spend more money on grid sensors and you have a really good odometry on your robot, you could get away with that. I think it's totally costly. Albin, yes? Yeah, thank you. Could the robot be potentially, potentially, okay, I know it doesn't mean that we get drone. That means it's fun. So something like Terminator. So we have flying drones around. Second question is, we took a ride by bikes to land post one. It's somewhere to us. Oh yeah, the sticker with all the bicycles, yeah. That's it, that's it, yeah. Okay, on the way back, we had an intersection that the ride leader said, this is not yet on Google Maps. And if we were sending a, okay, let's call the tribal bus car, as your robot, would he end up on the sidewalk or would he be able to navigate this way around that? Yeah, thanks for the question, Albin. So two questions there. One is, can we do the same with a drone, like a flying type of robot? And I think it's possible definitely. So we have drones that are, can be fitted with the same type of sensors. LiDARs, predominantly I use, that can then map the world. So people are already using this type of technology with drone navigation indoors. So I think it's certainly possible to do that. Just probably the representation of the world will be different here. We're dealing with 2D optical secrets. Maybe there you're storing a 2D point cloud or maybe you're storing this feature map or a bag of words that I talked about in the visual side. Second question is about, I think navigating in unexplored territories. I think this really depends on the navigation algorithm itself.  So I think it could be possible, it really depends on the algorithm, whether the algorithm allows the agent to go into an unexplored territory when it's not mapping. Okay, so I've seen that there's like two extremes that you can go to. One is like making it more like the gaming simulation where you have an absolutely amazing kind of photorealistic digital twin to work with. The other one, you can also go to the other extreme where you just go with the floor plan instead of any simulation like the gentleman mentioned that you can just take a cut to figure out the map. Which way would you foresee this project going? I'm definitely leaning towards a simulation approach because it doesn't restrict you to just rely on 2D occupancy maps. Sure, the slice approach works with 2D maps, but this kind of approach even lets you try other more sophisticated navigation stacks, right? So what if you're doing visual navigation, just pure vision-based navigation that's taking in two stereo images figuring out where you are. A lot of the food delivery robots in IDLOW, for example, do this, they look upstairs, they look at the ceiling to figure out where the robot is right now. That's called stargaze navigation. So if you want to do stuff like that, you want to try that out in simulation. You want to have that same kind of representation in the real world. So I think there's more benefits to keeping it general, but if you want to save computation, I think that's also another approach. If you want to try 3D slam, this would also work. But if you want to test some perception algorithms, maybe you're doing some perception-based, some deep learning inference, or you're doing something else, you can use the image from the simulation and then run your inference. So that, I think there's some benefits to this. Yeah, so we don't have more time for questions.


The Rife Center in Grand Rapids is rebranding and the idea is all about creating the best community experience possible. Lakeland News reporter Shrell Moore has details about the new look. This $11 million renovation really took us about three years to get through the entire renovation and we're still finishing up some of the very final details to make that happen. The Rife Center in Grand Rapids has made a few changes and they're all to bring more life to the ultimate performance arena. The lobby space is much expanded. It's an opportunity for people to meet and gather and before performances, after performances, to share stories, to be together. The Rife Center hosts up to 50 touring performances a year, not to mention shows from Grand Rapids High School. There's also a dance studio. The building's new features are meant to optimize the space to create the best shows possible. We have a Rife Dance program and we've renovated the dance studio so that we have three 2,000 to 2,500 square foot studios. Main stage, the Wilcox Theater has been renovated, entirely new seating. We've lifted the height of the ceiling above the stage. We've created a full fly space that allows us to bring in some major touring theater performances now that simply we didn't have the capacity to do before. We've created the new Mary Ives Studio Theater, which is a 200 seat studio theater with a retractable seating. The Rife Center has been working on these upgrades for the last couple of years. The whole idea is to bring a new sense of magic to new generations. We're rebranding to have a fresh new look to come out to the community and say this is our Rife Center for the entire region. Come on in and share the joy, share experiences in the arts. Along with the building, the website also got a new look and that's where you'll be able to find all the upcoming performance dates. The idea that we have is that this is not one single thing, but that this is the community's place to share stories, share performances, share events. Reporting in Grand Rapids, Sheryl Moore, Lakeland News. Another new feature of the rebranding is that tickets for shows can now be bought on the Rife Center website without any additional fees. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Nah. Press live. My accident. Just bear with me guys, I'm trying to set up the camera. My setup, which is a little bit rubbish. Sorry guys, I'm making a seasick. I'm such a professional right now. How's the music and everything? I always do that check. Is it too loud? Am I too quiet? Yeah, I accidentally pressed live as I was trying to set up my device. That looks a bit better isn't it? Cool. Hey everybody, welcome. Your name is Sakina. I don't know why you want me to say your name. Is the music okay? I feel like it's too loud. Okay, we're just going to be opening some palette full packs today because I got sent them and then I was supposed to do a video with them but I just never found the time. So I thought I'd do a little live stream quickly. I've only got an hour. We can do a lot in an hour I guess. Right? Just going to pour my coffee because I'm super needing caffeine right now. Ah yeah. So palette full packs are like a creativity box. They send you one a month for a fee and then you get random art supplies in them. So I don't know what's in any of these. I'm sure you guys know what's in them probably because you've probably watched other people unboxing these on the right time. I'm just going to say that I'm live on Twitter. Is it still too loud the music or is it okay? I'm kind of shouting though. I'm kind of speaking really loudly. I always call them palette full boxes but they're not. They are palette full packs. Very hard to say that for some reason. What the? I tried to tag a palette full pack in my tweet and then it said parry war. It like automatically changed it to parry war which is kind of weird. It's perfect. Crank it up. Okay good. Good. Get some coffee. Let's settle in guys because we're going to open these palette full packs. Let's do it. This is the first one. I do not know what month it came. It's probably been a while. Yeah. So let's open them. This is the first one. If you can see it. It always comes with this stuff and it kind of annoys me a bit because it gets everywhere. Like it's fun the first time you open one. You're like yay. And then after a while it's like oh I'm going to throw all this out now. So this one has come with a nice watercolor brush. It's called a we mop which doesn't sound very appealing. Does it? And that weird shrill giggle in the background was Chris by the way. It literally says it on the handle we mop which I don't know if anybody like considered that how that would sound. It also comes with a nice watercolor. Wow. Watercolor sketchbook. If this wants to stay open. I ripped it. I'm sorry. I think that made anyone cringe. We need to see what's inside. This watercolor sketchbook 400 pages. Pretty good. Strap more. And it's called press. Nice. Very nice. Thank you. We mop. Like honestly. And then oh a palette of Van Gogh. I've never really tried these and I think I had like one and it was never really like a massive fan but maybe this will make me try them. It comes like this for some reason. I think it probably fell off. Oh these things are so annoying. They're like cute and then fun and then really annoying. They've also kind of stained the palette a little bit here which is strange and that's the palette. It's kind of cool. And then the brush I think is a really cool one that you a travel one that you can do that with which is kind of nice. I like those. Heck yeah. And then we have like lots of nice colors. Peel them off here. Okay the glue is kind of stuck to the. There you go. Be free. My beauty is be free. Very nice. It's nice and a little set isn't it? And it also has like the wells here for mixing which is cool. I keep saying cool for everything. I'm very sorry. I'm not very. I'm not very awake. Probably should be the even though it's nearly midday. It is midday here. Okay so that's how it comes and then we have something else in here which is watercolor postcards. Nice. I might do something with these for my my patrons. Let's see. I'm thinking about changing up the patron tiers for my patrons because I recently got a creak up and I want to I want to have a go at making stickers and stuff. So let me know if you guys would be interested in that because I'm not really sure like when I first set up my patron it was kind of like it was to help make it a bit easier on me so it was like more relaxed and making prints and stuff every month. But now I'm thinking now I've eased into it. I think I want to do like a print and stickers a month like that kind of thing. There's a hole you put the end of the brush and it pops into the mixing tray. When? Hang on a second. Okay I'm ripping this thing. There's no need for this is there and I can't get it off. Making everyone cringe. Step 2020 here. Um where does it go? Oh I see. Oh my god if you hadn't said that I would not have known. That's so clever. I love it. I don't imagine when I would use it but I would make an excuse. I like this. That's really cute. What do you guys think about Vango watercolours? Are they any good? Because I've never really tried it. Pop it out. Pop it up. Pop it up. Put it back in. Pop it up. Very handy.  Very nice. You tilt it and the tray pops. Oh my god I'm learning things guys. I'm learning things from you. How? The tray pops out. Come on pop it out. How'd you do it? Are you sure? I mean it looks like it should do. Use the hole. Ah there we go guys. Oh I see. Okay that that makes sense. Thanks guys. Oh that's clever. Okay we're going to be using that. We're going to be using that guys. It's 2020. Let's live on the edge with our our wee mop brush. If you've just arrived I'm opening powerful packs and I received a wee mop brush which I'm I'm never going to get over because I think it's quite funny. Spenny Almus, the wee mop. Wee mop and some nice watercolour postcards and a watercolour sketchbook and then we're going to open the next one. We try to have painstakingly already cut for you guys so it's pretty easy. That was cathartic yeah when we finally figured out how how to do it. It probably was quite nice to see it. I have a 20 year old Van Gogh palette. Wow. Wow that sounded really sarcastic but I was actually interested. That's impressive. I prefer Schminke. Yeah I really like Schminke but I did what's wrong with me. I spend so much money on art supplies but I'm always like oh I want Schminke but it's too expensive and then when I have a chance to buy I'm like oh it's too expensive and then I buy like 20 other thousand paints.  I think the wee mop is my new favourite paintbrush though to be honest like okay next box and we've got more of these delightful things I get everywhere which are quite fun but yeah let's get into it. So we've got some koi watercolour brush pens. My arm just got stuck to that sticker that I peeled off the palette which seemed quite nice. I've never used these before. Let's check them out. Oh nice. Water-based dye stuff ink. Looks good. Looks good. I would not say no to those. I asked you to say my name because I wanted to be reminded that you recognise me. Yeah sure. I find myself avoiding expensive paints as well. I get too nervous to use them. I don't get nervous using them because I'm like hey I'm so excited when I get stuff I'm like yeah and then I'll probably waste them but yeah I don't know why. If you spend money in small sums like a lot of small sums over a period of time it seems less than just spending one like on one big purchase which is so silly. I find myself oh I've just read that sorry. Just a question do you know BTS? Yeah of course. We stan. I don't know them that well though so don't test my knowledge. Don't come for me. Um yeah so I've got Micron pen. I've got a few of these so I'm not that wild but that's pretty cool if you don't have them. I mean I would have been one like a few years ago when I hadn't really heard of them. I also have this big pigment BB pen and I also have this white general pen but I will not say no to more of one I already have that I already like because I already like all these things so it's pretty cool. I'm good thank you. How are you? I bought three tubes of lucas in magenta I maybe said magna in magenta yellow and cyan and mixed all of my own colors that's awesome. Yeah that's what I did kind of I bought like little tubes of them to see if I like them the instrument k ones and I did but now I would like I like more because I'm greedy like that. What else do we have? Oh another Micron pen and a pigment fine liner I haven't tried this one so that'll be interesting. This is pentel. I really like pentel stuff so yes very nice they're all waterproof I think so that's good because they'll work with these watercolor brush pens and then we have some paper some stone hench aqua okay I'm just reading about them cold press hot press and cold press heavy so they have like all the different stuff that you can find out about watercolor paper which is pretty interesting because I was always confused about what cold pressed and hot pressed meant interesting I wonder if it says on each sheet which one is because I would not be able to tell myself I live in Gibraltar which is a British overseas territory on the coast of Spain it's not Spanish I can never remember which is which yeah me either I'm like and even this I'm like are they gonna tell me because I'm gonna definitely mix these up I don't want to try the paper because I feel like that will be wasteful so I want to plan something if I do that if I use that paper okay provide little spaghettis let's hope that you never come back I'm gonna be finding these in like drawers and things for days because I get the cats will get it okay um what's next that's it um let's try let's try stuff I can't wait to try my we mop guys we mop while you're looking at me hot press is not as grainy as cold press yeah and I think cold press like the I believe that the water takes a while to absorb so it's like drying times are a little bit longer right right guys what are you reading at the moment I'm halfway through the boatman's daughter by Andy Davidson it's dark and grim and magical it's brilliant that sounds cool um I was I just finished a book it's called out um it was a very weird book like it was good and then it had a very strange ending and I wasn't sure if I liked it or not you know yeah um but we're also doing a patreon read if you're interested in books we read a book a month and we create art together and chat and I send stuff sometimes so I have to plug my patreon guys I'm sorry I'm trying to I'm trying to build it up a little bit because then it would be nice to uh don't tell my work but work on this stuff all time secret between you and me I hope no one from my work is watching I love my work I don't ever want to leave I'm just gonna get some water for the watercolors okay I have returned asked because none of the UK is so sunny yeah um so it's usually quite sunny I don't know if this is better or this is better that's better um I mean it's supposed to be the end of summer and it's still quite warm here which is kind of normal but then I'm hoping that in October it starts to get a little bit cooler and then um November it's cold I believe I can't wait it's so hot over the summer here really do you have a favorite novel I'm always looking for recommendations well um we just finished Mexican Gothic which I probably if you follow me you might know in my patreon thing and I made these little mini prints for everybody in my patreon and I really like that book it really surprised me it was a five star read so I would say that's my favorite book of the year right now but my favorite novels I have 10 I have like a few of them um I really like to kill a mockingbird noughts and crosses salt house five um pachinko horns a handful of dust I really like the hate you give I'm sorry it's a bit rubbishy because it's like um to just say loads of books isn't it I don't really have a favorite I wish I could join patreon but I don't have a job at the moment no worries like totally understand totally being there that sucks it was orange here in California last week yeah that did not look very nice that looked horrible um guys it's time to use the we mop this boy you've been waiting your whole life for it's we mop time um so we're gonna use this stressful watercolor cold press paper yeah um I don't like how it kind of stops here so I'm gonna pull it there we go okay so let's just test out the van go paints with the we mop shall we I'm particularly drawn to this orange first oh I like the paper the paper's nice as you know if you follow me I always say if you follow me but I guess if you're here you probably do follow me I don't really like doing swatches so let's try and figure out something in the campaign just go for it the we mop is holding up guys it holds a lot of we I mean water that was a gross joke isn't it I'm sorry I'm really sorry about that so I I'll get my coat it's 4 a 30 a.m go to sleep or wake up I don't know what do you do at that point do you go back to sleep or do you wake up you rock thank you Reaper Man I'm reading Reaper Man by Toe Pratshit cool I never really got into Toe Pratshit but I think I should give him another try I think I Chris I think I tried to read him when I was like younger and then I just I don't know I didn't understand it I guess so maybe as an adult I might enjoy it more does that make sense I think I was very much more into like romance and stuff when I was younger even though I hate to admit that young me would be like no I've been just like stories death goes missing so people aren't dying properly oh yeah I think I've heard of that actually oh that is really an unnatural green uh let's mix it yeah so if you guys do not know I I'm kind of this artist who just goes for stuff so I probably will make a mess of the paints and things like that um that tends to bother some people sometimes but I'm just you know I just do what I like and I go for stuff I don't know what this music is by the way I'm playing it from this new music streaming service no it's not streaming services um royalty free service where you can pay for like a pass and then you can get the music and use it for your youtube videos and stuff so I'm just playing stuff off that website at the moment so it's random it's just jazz at the moment so we could uh change it to something else I really like this paper um and I really like this color I've made the paper is super smooth because it's like it even has it it sort of has like a a shininess a shine quality to it because it it it's like I don't know what I'm trying to say like it's a slippery surface so it's kind of um pushing back against the water which is nice because then you get some like really nice textures going on some stories are not easy for kids to understand I'm listening to Neil Gaiman's American Gods yeah definitely I think I because I remember trying to read um to kill a mockingbird when I was probably like first this is a Christmas song this is not what we want I tried to read um to kill a mockingbird when I was younger and I was like what what's happening and then I read it as an adult and I was like this makes sense I don't know why I was troubling but because I was a kid I guess let's change the music acoustic I don't know what to play let's play some chill music you know you're reading crime and punishment now that is a hefty book isn't it my friend


Welcome everybody to the NPTEL course on rural water resource management week three. In the last lecture, we looked at groundwater as a hydrological component. Groundwater storage and groundwater induced base flow. So we looked into the some properties of groundwater and in today's lecture, we'll see how groundwater has been managed or monitored across India. Because it is a important resource for rural water management, we will be spending one more extra lecture on groundwater. Let's start with groundwater monitoring and measurements. As I said previously, the central groundwater board in short called CGWB is the authority for groundwater monitoring and measurements in India. This is a central government agency. On top of this, every state has their own monitoring and measurement agencies for groundwater. Mostly it will be with the PWD, which is the public water department or irrigation department, etc. So they will have their own wells or they have in collaboration with farmers, they will have a monitoring network where they look at water depletion. They monitor the water levels at regular intervals and have access to these wells. Let's look at the central government program. So it is based on physical monitoring by observation wells. It's not modeling, they don't assume, but they actually measure, which is very important for groundwater monitoring. The central groundwater board is the official monitoring agency as I mentioned and has a total of 32,730 wells as per the latest report in 2020. So and the location of the wells is given in the figure here wherein you see a lot of wells along the most important states for agriculture. Some less number of wells in Rajasthan because of the desaturated area or very semi-arid air conditions, not much groundwater, etc. And you don't see wells in the hilly regions. So if you remember the lecture from previous week and also the couple of lectures before this, we mentioned that for groundwater to be available, you should have a soil plus a weather material. If it is purely rock as you can find in the hilly regions, you won't have that much groundwater. So it is not that important to monitor regularly in these regions. So along the borders, you don't see much groundwater monitoring, but if you see in Central India and wherever there's good agriculture activities, you see a good spread of monitoring wells. Around 16,375 wells are for shallow aquifers. Please understand the difference as we explained earlier. A shallow aquifer would be from the top of the land surface up to a confining layer, impervious layer. After the impervious layer, you do have another aquifer, which could be your deeper aquifer. So that is monitored by pysomics, around 6,355 pysomics for accessing deep wells. So what is the difference between these two? The dug wells are mostly in shallow, which is approximately 30 meters. And you would normally measure it with a tape or you would have automatic measuring device. But for pysometers, which is a tube, which goes very deep into the ground, more than 30 meters. So in some regions, you say that groundwater is at 300 meters. So in Chennai, I would remember people complaining that the groundwater level has fallen to very, very low levels, like around 300, 250 meters, et cetera. So at that level, you cannot have a tape and a measure. So you would have an automatic monitoring device. And that setup is called a pysometer, a pysometer, which is one which goes down in. So now we understood that the government is actually monitoring both shallow aquifers. Most of the wells is tapping into the aquifers. Let's see how you would put in, let's differentiate between the shallow monitoring wells and the deep monitors. So this image is from the courtesy of British Georgia Survey, where they've done a lot of work in Nepal and bordering regions of India on assessing groundwater. How they would do it is almost common across. So let's look at different methods. So the first one is just a normal, long, deep well. So this could be your pysometer where you would put in a bore well and a pysometer at the bottom. And it is screened along the well, which means water can come in through all areas into the well. And you would actually measure the water level from here. Sometimes you don't need to go deep as the bedrock, but still here you could see the fractures present and water is present. So it is okay to measure into the very fractured network. Then you have a short well, which is for mostly your dug wells. So the 15,000 plus 16,000 plus wells that we saw in the previous slide is mostly of this nature. And then you have the difference between them. You could see clearly that it is measuring the shallow aquifers, the water is moving from left to right and into your streams. You could see that the other well is also screened from that same level from the water table, but goes throughout the aquifer until the bedrock, which is here. Then you have a nested single bore well. So this is a very important phenomenon because you would like to see at a single point how the shallow aquifer responds and how the deep aquifer responds. Because in this example, you have it isolated, so you have a deep aquifer monitoring and then you have a shallow aquifer monitoring. But in this diagram, what you see is a nested. Nested means together nested. So in a nested configuration, you have around the three different wells monitoring the same aquifer, very, very close. That is what is called nested so that you capture the same aquifer dynamics. So you have here, it's going into the shallow aquifer, the first well. The second well would be going into a somewhat between the shallow and the deep aquifer. And then the third well is going to a deep aquifer. So at a single point, you are measuring three different aquifers at the same location. This would give you a better understanding of how the shallow and the deep aquifers react to pumping. For some instances, when you pump too much shallow water, the deep aquifer is also suffering because there is less recharge happening. And then you have clustered separate bore wells. So similar to nested but clustered and a little bit separate. So you have it spaced out evenly to measure water and also the pollutants how they move. So these wells can also be used for water quality assessments because they can take a sample out. For water levels, you don't need a sample. We just put a meter in or a tape in and measure. We'll come to the devices later. But for water quality, you would take a sample out and then take it to the lab or do in situ water quality measurements. Then you have a multi-level well wherein you could actually take water from different depths by openings at different levels. This is mostly for a water quality assessment where you would stop and then take a sample here from the seepage. So when water is coming in from the side, you would take a sample and then go down, take another sample, take another sample. So these are for the water quality but I'm showing it mostly for also water levels. So you now have a difference of opinion between how you would monitor a dug well which is a shallow well which is using a single well monitoring well. Then you can also monitor a deep well or a nested or a clustered well. So what are the different methods that we could use for measuring on water level and how are they collected? So for measuring wells, you could have basically a steel tape with measurements and you put in a steel tape inside the well. The chalk would be washed away by water and when you pull it out, you know where the chalk has been washed away. So that would give you the depth from the top, how deep the aquifer is or the water level is. Then you have similarly an electric tape, same method but it gives you a light bulb or a sound when it touches the water because the electrical connection is made. Pressure transducers are put in piezometers where piezometer is a well which goes deep. As I said, pressure transducers is an instrument where it can actually record a pressure difference between because of the height of the water and when there's a change in water, it would record the change in pressure on the instrument. It is a very sensitive instrument which means it can easily capture even small changes in ground water level and it is one of the best methods to use but it is a little bit expensive. An acoustic probe, ultrasonic, etc. use the sound wave properties to go in and come out to tell the water levels from the well and floats, poppers, airlines, etc. So floats and poppers are same like it just floats on the water and then you make an electrical connection, etc. So these are for non-flowing wells which means a well which is, yes, it recharges so it flows into the well but then it is stationary. It doesn't move up and down when you see the water. So because at a very quick instance, you cannot put the chalk in and take and then say it is moving, the water is moving. So you will have to wait till the water stabilizes. So that is what we call non-flowing wells. So water can recharge. Let's say it recharges in the night. In the morning when you come and see, the water will be at a particular level. You take it and measure it out. So to be consistent, it is always good to measure the water level at the same time every day. So for example, every month you want to take a sample. You go on the first day of the month. The first day of the month, you should go at exactly the same time. Let's say 6 o'clock in the morning, you go to 6 o'clock and take the measurement so that it is comparable. Then you have the flowing wells where you have a well like the artesian well. So the artesian well is a well where even without pumping, the water will come out. Why will it come out? Because of the principle I told earlier, water flows from high potential to low potential, high pressure to low pressure. So this water inside the aquifer, the confined aquifer or the deep aquifer is under tremendous pressure because of the mass on top of it. So it will be pushing the water down. It has pressure. It cannot go anywhere, the water because underneath is also an impervious surface. So the water is under tremendous pressure and when you put in a well, just a bore, a hole inside, what happens is you will see water just gushing out because outside atmospheric pressure is much lower than the pressure inside. So the water will come out until the pressure inside the confined aquifer is equalized. So how do you measure flowing well in that? Same transducer, pressure transducer can be put in because it is very accurate and quickly measured and a manometer or a pressure gauge on top of the well where it measures the water or the pressure difference. So in most cases, you would be using as the central water board, etc., you'll be using a tape method. So this is the tape method, an electric water level tape method, pretty expensive for the technology. And what you do is you would lower this probe. You could lower this probe and this is a meter which has the markings of SI units, which is and then you would leverage it in. So you would see me putting the meter into the groundwater level, groundwater wells in both the cases. And then when it goes in and the probe touches the water, the connection is made. So there is one wire which goes on this side and another wire on the other side. Those are not connected. So the two wires are not connected. But when the probe is also connected to these two wires and the probe touches water, water makes the connection between the two wires and then you hear a beep or a light. So the beep sound or light will come around here and you will stop lowering the probe and that level you would read off from your meter. So that is basically how you would measure groundwater level. Please understand that from the base of the well. So if this is the land, this is the well you would measure from here going down. So it is a depth to water level. Then you'll have to convert it back to height of water level. So from here you know zero, you would estimate the water level by just knowing the distance from the top to the water level. So for example, let's do an exercise. From here the water base is zero and you know that the well is at 50 meters and the water is at 10 meter depth. So what would you do? You would subtract 10, 10 from 50 to get 40 meters. So from zero the water level is at 40 meters and that is how you establish a head. In the groundwater class I'd go through again on these exact same methods. But here it is good to understand how you collect groundwater level data. So now we have collected the data. So what does Central Ground Water Board do? They collect four times a year and these are the months or seasons they collect pre-monsoon. So somewhere in the peak of summer June or I would say May. Then you have another collection during the peak of your monsoon. Here it is August and the monsoon after the monsoon has one or two months. So let's say it stops in September. You can take it in October and then November, December, January for the winter. So approximately three months in between they take a sample. So this depth to water level gives a lot of inferences. So here they don't do the head which I told earlier. They do a simple depth to water level. So basically lower the meter and from the ground how deep is your groundwater level. Let's see what this exercise is taking the pre-monsoon or the peak summer. So you have the depth to water levels in meters below ground level. So meters below ground level, MGL, that's the unit, MBGL, meters below ground level or you might see MGL also. What you find here is less than two, two to five, the coloring is the same. So I've read it out from here and 10 to 20, 20 to 40 and greater than 40 meters. So anything greater than 40 meters is pretty deep. So they would say that it is pretty red in color, which means kind of dangerous. Whereas less than two is okay. It's a good number. In the summer season here in the pre-monsoon level, you would see that most of the hilly regions are still okay in the blue and green color. I would say the coloring scheme is really good, how they've picked up the colors for the levels because it tells a warning signal. So here blue and green means good water. Water is blue in color. So when you see blue and green color, that means the water levels are healthy. So here along these regions, it is healthy. The hilly areas, they don't collect water levels, as I mentioned, because it is very hard to drill down and get the water. So there's no point of setting the water levels there. Not much is being done. And then along the border. So you would see that wherever the western guards is, the water levels are pretty okay compared to the central and the eastern part, northeastern part. So along Rajasthan and Gujarat and central India, the water levels are pretty bad in terms of depth, which is really concerning because as the depth increases, you have to supply more energy to take the water. And as the depth increases, the water quality changes and the time of recharge also changes. So it takes longer time for the water from a deep aquifer to recharge. So it is very important to understand this map of pre-Monson water levels, the summer. So once you understand this, then we have your summer is gone. The monsoon comes in June, July, August. So you have the peak, August, monsoon month. And you could see that most of central India is turning into blue and western guards, Maharashtra, where we are from, the water levels are pretty healthy along the western guards. After the western guards, you could see it is not that good. This is because of when the precipitation I taught you, it is because of the orographic effort. The rainfall picks up on one side of the western guards, whereas on the other side, it is totally dry. So what you see here is the central India is now turning into blue in terms of healthy water levels. So water levels within two meters from the ground, whereas the Rajasthan part and other parts are still really, really bad in terms of groundwater, but it's turning slightly into pink from dark red and red into pink. And then you have the southern region where tremendous agriculture activity is happening. Still, you do have less groundwater, but also it's because the monsoon is not the same. So most of India gets the monsoon by June, July, whereas this part gets it later and we will see it in the next images. And this is the post-monsoon map, mostly around September, November. And you could see that most of these regions, which were blue, have turned into healthy in terms of the is yellow, whereas two to five is green. So somewhere it is still okay to be pumped. So from two to five meters, they're pumping the groundwater. The water levels are not fluctuating much. And now you see slowly the southern part of India also turns green. So there is a lag between the precipitation that occurs on the Western Ghaz and Central India. And then one or two months later, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra, Karnataka gets their rainfall, gets a share of rainfall. So you see that water levels have actually stabilized in most of India except your Rajasthan and Gujarat regions. And then in the winter season, January, again, the water level slowly starts to deplete. It could be because of water use or also because the water would be slowly going into base flow, the groundwater, and the base flow goes into the rivers, rivers goes into the oceans and seas. So the water continues to move. And this understanding is very important that it's not like water will just stay there, groundwater. So some, up to some level it stays. But once it goes beyond the level, it will start moving to the zero level, which is the sea and ocean. So what do we see here? If the pre-monsoon, which is the pre-monsoon of 2019, is the same or similar from the pre-monsoon in 2020, then it is okay, because every year you kind of take the water and put it back during the precipitation. But if it is not the same, imagine like a bank account. So you have a bank account, you have money before four months, you take some money and during the precipitation peak season, which is a monsoon, you put back some more money. And if the first year of analysis and second year of analysis are the same, the water levels are same, you are okay. It's sustainable, we would call. Most, relatively it is sustainable because whatever water you use, the precipitation is putting it back into the groundwater aquifer. So you're fine. But that is not the case because what is happening is slowly it comes slow. So let's say if it was 10 meters in pre-monsoon conditions in the next year it becomes 11 meters and slowly the depth to the water level is increasing. And that is why you see more and more of these blocks converting into red color. Red color is pretty bad in terms of depth to water level. So now the exercise has been done. So they got four times a year and then they estimate how much water recharges. If you know the rainfall and if you know how much level, the water level has increased, for example from 10 meters it has increased 5 meters. For example, here you had all these regions around 10 to 20 meters of groundwater. And later after the pre-monsoon, post-monsoon it has come to green color, which is 2 to 5 meters. So by that you need to understand that the recharges happen. So if the water use is equal to your water you put in, it is safe and semi-critical. And if you almost come close to the water use is almost equal, you become critical because you need some water for the ecosystem services and rivers, as I mentioned. But then when it goes above your groundwater available, for example, your extraction is more than your recharge, groundwater recharge, than it is an over-exploited state. So the groundwater mapping committees of India through the Central Water Board, etc. So they have actually put in a plan to map aquifers. So because unlike your surface water, aquifers and groundwater do not have a watershed boundary. They do not follow an administrative boundary. A dam can be put in a state and you can make sure that the water doesn't go to another state by channelizing the water. But you cannot do that for groundwater. Rivers can be stopped by checkdams, but you cannot do that for groundwater. So that is why they have been doing an aquifer mapping. So you can see here where they're mapping. And how did they pick these locations? Because they know how many use the Central Ground Water Board and understanding where the safe semi-critical and critical blocks are, they have colored it red for over-exploited blocks. So if groundwater is more abstracted than the recharge, then it is an over-exploited. So those are the blocks they want to map the aquifer so that they could do some water management plans, groundwater management plans. So this is where we need to be careful in understanding how many areas have been demarcated. So for example, total over-exploitation in critical blocks are 1,288 of which the aquifer mapping and some management activities are going around in 1,127 blocks. The priority areas are in eight states, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, etc., and other areas around 212. So in the eight states, you have 915 blocks. So in other areas, you have 212 blocks. For example, in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, there are some blocks that are there monitoring. So these are the areas for prioritized aquifer mapping. They want to map the boundaries of the groundwater storage and by mapping, they have now a better idea to put in structures or control the demand of water by saying you cannot pump more than this volume or you cannot use a particular crop. For example, if it is sugarcane or banana, you cannot use groundwater. So that kind of regulations they can put once they have the aquifer mapped the boundaries and they have this map of where the critical blocks are. So almost Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, all these regions are under the scanner for better water management. And also, people are slowly understanding that if the groundwater is being depleted beyond a point, then your river flow is also reduced. And because of that, your surface water irrigation or the water you use from the rivers and dams for irrigation also is questioned. It reduces. So that is where slowly farmers and every agency is putting more focus on mapping the groundwater, reducing the use of groundwater and also managing better recharge techniques for groundwater. With this, we are covering the groundwater sector. And in the next lecture, I will go through the recap of for this week in some more examples. And we will conclude the hydrological.


whiteboard animation software comparison, the best ones.  Cool, this is the video for you because I'm gonna compare some of these. I'm gonna tell you what the best ones are so you can just go get it. And I'm also gonna share with you what I did and what happened and why it didn't work, okay? I did a whiteboard animation, it didn't work, but I wanna share that with you at the end. Let's get into the softwares first and show you which ones you wanna get. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Thank you so much for coming to my channel and watching this video. I really appreciate it. I've been selling online since 2009. I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, heck, it's your channel. This is your channel. You can ask any questions you want. I try to answer those questions. If you do have questions about a particular subject, please put it in the comments below. Ask me questions, let me know what you thought. Give me some feedback, okay? Give me a thumbs up if you like it. Thumbs down if you don't, doesn't matter. Just do those things. And don't forget to subscribe. There's a big subscribe button down there. Click that button and a bell will pop up. Looks just like this. And ring that bell. Turn on all notifications. That way you'll be part of the Fisher family. You'll be part of the VIP group that gets notified every single time I do one of these videos. All right, let's jump right into it. I wanna look at each one of these whiteboard animations. I'll put some stuff up on the screen so you can see it and see which ones are the best. Okay, the first one I got up here is Doodly. Doodly, okay? Now, according to its creators, Doodly is the easiest to use logo animation software. Anyone can use it. And you can create professional videos in a matter of minutes, which is pretty cool, right? As the name suggests, Doodly is used to create Doodle videos. Doodle videos, okay? Which is pretty cool. You can use it for engaging, interesting content, sales, marketing, classroom projects, anything you want. The best thing about Doodly is that all you have to do is point and click, okay? You don't need to be a graphic artist. You don't have to be a professional video maker, or you don't have to understand how to do code or any of that stuff, okay? Anyone from young and inexperienced to mature inexperienced can use the software to design any kind of video they desire. Doodly is ideal for all businesses. Whether it's big or small, I feel like it's one of the best logo animation softwares there are, okay? Some of the key features, it's really easy to use. You can use it to create whiteboard, greenboard, or glassboard and blackboard images. You can draw and upload your own images. There's no limit to the number of images that you can upload to a single video. Software has a large selection of male and female heads, which help make videos more personal and relatable. You can do your own voiceovers, which you can upload to your video in a matter of seconds. You also get music tracks from a variety of genres. Doodly has thousands of images and all of them are custom drawn by a team of professional graphic artists. You can install Doodly in as many devices as you want. So that's kind of cool. So if you've got a couple of different computers, that's not a problem. Now, if you buy the standard plan, it's $39 a month to access 200 characters, 200 props and images, and 20 royalty free music tracks and use it to create multiple videos on multiple devices. The enterprise plan costs $69 a month and gives you access to 750 characters, 6,200 props and images, 150 music tracks, unlimited videos and on unlimited devices and the membership to the Doodly Club. The next one is Video Maker FX. Video Maker FX is a software that facilitates creation of professional quality animation videos. It can be used to create various kinds of animations, quality that match with your presentation and match your requirements and it really helps to keep the attention of the audience. So that's a pretty cool software. It is compatible with Windows or Mac. It works fast and the process of video creation only takes a little longer or slower on computers. There's no watermarks on there, any limitations, anything like that. There's a facility for monthly subscription. Each license allows for use on two computers. So you are limited on this one. Over 20 royalty free music tracks for use. You can also use your own assets and video and you can do that with pretty much all of these. Excellent collection of backgrounds, images and icons are available to use with a few clicks. There are 35 themes. It comes with more than 240 customizable scenes for videos, training materials and manuals are available with installation guides for new users. Fully customized text editor allows you to create and add effects to the text of your video. Simply turn on or off facility for all features for ease of use. Next one up is Easy Sketch Pro. Now, Easy Sketch Pro is not only a whiteboard animation software, it also facilitates lead creation according to the requirements. Easy Sketch Pro specified click to call feature allows the presenter to get a direct call from the video while presenting, that's pretty cool. The possibility to add other videos to your project is another interesting feature of Easy Sketch Pro. You get the possibility to create standard or full HD videos, a facility to add music track from a built-in music library or import external storage, a built-in text editor. It provides functionalities such as text size and color to easily modify text. Also, you can manipulate wither sizing and rotate text like images. Playtime control and trimming effects. Next one I've got up is the Yonde. Previously's Go Animators, what they used to call it. But it's a whiteboard animation software that comes with a collection of backgrounds, props and character actions, which helps to create really nice eye-catching whiteboard animations. There are several themes to select from which are related to several occupations, industries and actions. So depending on what you do for a living, you can match it up. You can create your own characters as required by the topic, which I think is a really decided advantage. They have single-click publishing that allows publishing videos on a range of video hosting sites, a multi-language support, full HD video creation with MP4 format download facility, automatic lip sync facility, which that is really cool, that makes the video more natural. Automated infographics facility. Also, import tool to import images from outside the in-built Asset Collection. Next one is Movely. Used by many of the world's largest and successful companies to make their video animations. It's my number one pick. You sign up for Movely and you start to create presentations, animations or multimedia content. There's several free templates to start. Also, you can add your own images, sounds and video clips to animation. There are possibilities to view, edit, delete and restore the created video on Movely at the same time. Also, the video can publish to YouTube or Facebook channel. Some of the features are you can lock, object and layer facility. This will help you avoid unintended changes on time and position to the object or layer. Modifications to imported soundtracks like fade in or out, sound, split, sound, change, volume level. Control the view on timeline objects with show all check box. It's got a set of export formats for the created video. So pretty much every file type. Simply right click the menus in the editor with the context sensitivity, object renaming facility on the timeline, special occasion objects library, like Halloween object library. Next one is Paltune, Paltune. This will also do whiteboard animations and presentations. They have tons of ready-made templates with a possibility to edit or are available to create eye catching Paltune within a few minutes. Also, the dedicated style sheet allows for creation for special occasions like Halloween greetings, Valentine greetings, all that type of stuff. Some of the features are inbuilt royalty free music and style library up to 60 minutes HD and up to eight minutes fully HD video creation. You can do online video creation without any downloads, collections of inbuilt animation tools that cover all kinds of animation creation requirements. Well tested to ensure the tool is simple for optimal use. It's possible to share on social media and YouTube. Text editor for regular text editing requirements like font style size, color, all that stuff. You can import outside MP3 format audio files. You can import from Flickr or the computer. Timeline bar on the bottom of the screen indicates every object and it makes it easy to edit in point. And the last one I wanna tell you about is TrueScribe. TrueScribe is an award-winning whiteboard animation software that allows video creation without design experience, okay? So you don't have to know how to do this stuff. Some of the features are as possible to edit videos at any time even after the design stage is completed. There's a voice recording option to create new voice for videos. A set of free, clear machine voices to use with videos. There's an option to enable or disable the digital hands which draw images and sync with voice. Logos and photos can insert as .jpg files. You can add separate layers for the background image and a separate layer for textures. You can insert videos on the MP4 download format and share video through link sharing or embedded page. Five high contrast color schemes to select from and power punch to your videos. Special themes available for different industries and different requirements. Text editing with basic functionality and a facility to copy and paste text or type. Now that's certainly not every single one that's out there. There's more out there, but these are some of my top picks. The point is you can really get your message across and it's been proven that people consume content much better with a video. Some of you out there may not want to get on screen and I get it. As a matter of fact that goes back to my story I was gonna tell you in the beginning in 2013 I needed to do a video because I wanted to get distributors of my product and my thinking was I'd get them to pay a fee and buy a bunch of inventory and then they could go sell it. It was a dumb idea, it didn't work. But I blamed it on a bad whiteboard video. I made a whiteboard video that explained the process to them and I had a few inquiries but I really never got that going. I didn't sign up anybody that I can remember off of that program. But I put a lot of hours into it because I didn't want to get on screen and talk about that particular thing. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to get on screen. Now when I think back on it maybe it would have worked had I have got on screen had I have gotten in front of a camera and did that. Was it the idea that was bad? Was it the idea of using whiteboard that was bad? I don't know. Whiteboard is still out there and whiteboard is still better than no video at all. If you're vacillating and you're going should I do content and write this out or should I do a video? You 100% should always do a video. Now should everybody be on screen as opposed to a whiteboard? I would say you being on screen is usually better than a whiteboard but it may not be. Maybe you're not good on video. Maybe that's not your thing. Maybe you don't come across well. I don't know. If you do come across well, don't do whiteboard. Do yourself on screen. If you feel like you don't want to or you feel like it doesn't come out right use the whiteboard. But anything is better than written content. Written content is boring, boring. We don't want to read anything. We want to watch videos. Most of the content that people are consuming now is videos, okay? You got to get in that pool. You got to have videos. Now, I really appreciate you watching this particular video and I've put a course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free. Oh, you got to just click the link below. It's click and learn 100% free. Grab that course. Don't forget also if you haven't subscribed hit that subscribe button down there. You got to hit that subscribe button and as soon as you do a bell is going to pop up like this, you got to ring the bell. You got to ring the bell, turn on all notifications so that you're part of the Fisher family. You're part of the VIP group. It gets notified. I go, hey, it's just a new video. Here it is. Here's the link. I can send it to you that way. Isn't that cool? You'll get notifications on YouTube every single time I do a new video. That way you don't miss out on anything. Thank you so much for listening. Put your comments below, questions below. If you've had successes, failures, whatever, share it below, ask me questions. Feel free to do so. Let me know if you have a subject of a video that you'd like for me to do. I'll be happy to do that. Put that below. Give me a thumbs up or thumbs down and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. 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