The Drone Federation of India (DFI) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with American cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to push latter's services, and products including technical expertise and open data sets to its members.
Under the agreement, DFI will work with AWS as its preferred cloud service partner, providing its members, who are drone manufacturers, application developers, and operators to use AWS cloud infrastructure to develop their applications.
Both the company said that the collaboration will identify use cases for drones in India across various application areas such as land survey, precision agriculture, disaster management, and search and rescue missions, and build custom cloud-based solutions for them.
Both the organisations also claimed that they would also establish a drone innovation and operations hub in India to support drone-based innovation in the country, using AWS Cloud services. The hub will prototype and develop drone applications involving the drone ecosystem in India, comprising of startups, government bodies, and policy makers.
AWS said that drone deployments come with heavy requirements in data processing and warehousing. With map-based analytics becoming the next frontier in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based decision-making, reliable data warehousing capabilities for on-demand access to decision-making data is pivotal.
The company stressed that significant innovation in the drone industry is also happening around vision-based navigation systems, which equip drones with ML and vision-based features like indoor and spatial navigation, to further improve safety in advanced collision avoidance. These use cases require a combination of ML and IoT based workflows.
“If we want to see food and medicine deliveries, autonomous aerial transportation, large scale business transformation in mining, roads, and disaster management via drones, we will require the power of cloud computing and strong data-based workflows. We believe this collaboration will help enable stakeholders of the drone ecosystem build solutions for the future,” said DFI president Rahat Kulshreshtha.
