The Drone Federation of India (DFI) has signed an MoU to drive innovation in India’s drone ecosystem by empowering DFI’s partners with access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud services, technical expertise, and open data sets.
DFI is a non-government, not-for-profit, industry-led body that promotes and works towards building a safer and scalable autonomous drone aviation industry in India. DFI will work with AWS as its preferred cloud service, providing drone manufacturers, application developers, and operators a scalable, agile, secure, and robust cloud infrastructure to develop drone applications and accelerate time-to-market in India. The MoU was signed at the Drone Festival of India – 2020, held in New Delhi.
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.
DFI will 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.
DFI will empower the Indian drone industry by creating industry-leading proof of concepts and cloud workflow related programs. The initiative will provide technical expertise in data collection, data processing, and Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, and help transform the way organisations collect, store and interpret drone data.
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.
DFI and its partners will leverage AWS’s compute instances, storage services, and database services including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora for drone applications.
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 using Amazon SageMaker, AWS IoT Greengrass, and Amazon Rekognition services.
“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 Rahat Kulshreshtha, President, DFI.
“We are excited to collaborate with the Drone Federation of India, and serve as their cloud infrastructure provider to help shape the drone ecosystem in India,” said Rahul Sharma, President, India and South Asia Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services.
He added, “With the breadth and depth of AWS Cloud services across industry-leading compute, storage, database, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, drone developers and operators can now test new ideas quickly, and accelerate innovation in the application development that better serve citizens and impact society positively.”
