Amazon’s Cloud arm to speed up drone innovation in India

New Delhi: The Drone Federation of India (DFI) on Monday announced to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred Cloud service to boost the development and innovate around the drone ecosystem in the country.

The non-profit industry body will work with retail giant 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.

"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," Rahat Kulshreshtha, President, DFI, told IANS.

The industry body signed an MoU with AWS at the 'Drone Festival of India 2020' here.

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.

According to Rahul Sharma, President, India and South Asia Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL), verticals like agriculture, healthcare, smart cities etc will see massive drone deployment in months to come.

"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," Sharma told IANS.

India currently has nearly 100 drone startups and the autonomous drone aviation industry has great potential ahead, stressed Kulshreshtha.

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.