New Delhi: An Indian industry body engaged in drones has announced a tie-up with e-commerce giant Amazon’s cloud computing unit so the Indian drone industry can make better use of the vast amount of data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
The Drone Federation of India (DFI) describes itself as a non-government, not-for-profit industry body aiming to build a safe and scalable drone industry in the country.
“The Drone Federation of India (DFI) has announced the ‘Adopt Drones’ programme to accelerate the adoption of AI-driven drone solutions, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services,” the DFI said in a press note Monday.
AWS is a cloud-computing service that offers over 175 services to customers, employing emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), among other things.
In addition to data storage, other AWS services include analytics tools that can do things like analyse real-time video. It also offers cost-and-budget management service, and the chance to build apps without programming (a service that is still in testing phase).
Drones collect an enormous amount of data, usually in the form of images and videos, the press statement notes. Such raw data is then processed using software to render insight that can be useful to a business.
The DFI said this analysis is crucial to make the maximum use of flying a drone, but added that the software processes used currently are “laborious and have lesser accuracy and efficiency”.
The use of AI-based software programmes that employ algorithms and machine learning can yield insight that is more accurate, and generated at a faster pace, it added.
Also Read: Drones won the war for Azerbaijan. India must spend military modernisation money wisely
‘Build, test, deploy’
The Adopt Drones Program, the DFI said, will have six phases. It will focus on developing AI-driven solutions for “20 sectors, including agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare, and rural development”.
“This program shall be an inflection point for the drone industry. The program intends to experiment, develop and promote drone solutions with large enterprises. This program will create multiple business opportunities… using drones,” DFI director Smit Shah was quoted as saying in the note.
“We want to transform the common usage of drones from a data-acquisition tool to an end-to-end solution capable of acquiring data as well as generating deep insights for business to leverage. This will enable regular usage of drones amongst large enterprises,” he added.
AWS will support Indian drone application developers by providing a technical review on how to optimise cost and performance of their cloud-computing solutions, and making AWS promotional credits available so that developers can have wider access to AWS Cloud services.
This will help developers “build, test and deploy their secure and scalable solutions on the cloud” at a lesser cost. In addition, the AWS will also provide support when developers pitch their solutions to large enterprises.
“The Adopt Drones Program is an exciting opportunity for drone application developers to experiment with AWS services in areas such as analytics, and machine learning, and use available resources from AWS partners to innovate,” said Rahul Sharma, president, public sector, at Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, AWS India and South Asia, as quoted in the note.
Another unit of Amazon has been working on its own drone-based service. Since 2013, Amazon has been working on unmanned deliveries where packages are delivered using drones. The service is called Prime Air and is a “future delivery system” aiming to deliver goods in 30 minutes or less.
Amazon received “federal approval” from the US to start testing commercial delivery drones in August but reportedly laid off “dozens” of employees from the project’s R&D and manufacturing units in November as part of a “reorganisation” effort.
Also Read: Drones are delivering PPE and test samples to clinics in Covid-hit Africa