In a bid to boost the development of drones in India, the Drone Federation of India (DFI) on Monday announced to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred Cloud service.
According to reports, the industry body signed an MoU with AWS at the ‘Drone Festival of India 2020’ in New Delhi. “AWS was a natural choice for us which will help drone manufacturers and developers as its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, open data sets and technical prowess are simply unmatched,” said Rahat Kulshreshtha, President, DFI, in a conversation with a leading media organisation. He also added that India currently has nearly 100 drone startups and the autonomous drone aviation industry has great potential ahead.
The collaboration is said to identify use cases for drones in the country across various application areas such as land survey, precision agriculture, disaster management, and search and rescue missions, and build custom cloud-based solutions. The non-profit industry body will work with Amazon’s Cloud arm to help provide a scalable, agile and secure Cloud infrastructure for drone manufacturers, application developers and operators to develop drone applications and accelerate time-to-market in India.
Rahul Sharma, President, India and South Asia Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL), reportedly said that verticals like agriculture, healthcare and smart cities will see significant drone deployment in the near future. “AWS Open Data sets with granularity will let drone developers innovate further and deeper. With industry-leading compute, storage, database, IoT, AI and L, drone developers and operators can now test new ideas quickly, and accelerate innovation,” Rahul reportedly said.
A 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.
*Edited from an IANS report.