Drone Federation of India, AWS partner to boost India’s drone ecosystem

The DFI (Drone Federation of India) has signed an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud services to accelerate innovation in India’s drone ecosystem.

DFI will work with AWS as its preferred cloud service partner to provide operators a scalable, agile, secure, and robust cloud infrastructure to develop drone applications and accelerate time-to-market in India.

The non-government, not-for-profit, industry-led body DFI, promotes and works towards building a safer and scalable autonomous drone aviation industry in India.

The MoU was signed on Tuesday at the Drone Festival of India – 2020, held in New Delhi. The agreement is expected to help DFI establish a drone innovation and operations hub in India, according to a statement. 

“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, ” Rahat Kulshreshtha, president, DFI said.

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.

The initiative will also provide technical expertise in data collection, data processing, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) use cases, and help transform the way organizations collect, store and interpret drone data.

Map-based analytics have become the next frontier in AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) based decision-making, the company said in a statement.

“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,” Rahul Sharma, president, India and South Asia Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services.

The global drone market is expected to grow to $127 billion by 2020, according to a study by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. India is an emerging market for drones and local UAV startups  provide services like agricultural mapping, weather forecasts and disaster relief apart from catering to the requirements of the entertainment industry. 

A group of companies recently announced it is working towards creating an open source code, certified by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), to meet the requirements of the ‘no permission - no takeoff’ (NPNT) software programme.