The Drone Federation of India (DFI) has announced a new Adopt Drones program to accelerate the adoption of AI-driven drone solutions, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services. The program will understand solutions by drone application developers which leverage machine learning to produce deep insights from the data collected using drones.
Drones and Data
Drones collect an enormous amount of data, usually in the form of images and videos. This data is then processed using software to derive qualitative and quantitative business insights. While this analysis is crucial, the current analytical processes are laborious and have lesser accuracy and efficiency than what is needed for large scale deployments.
There is a need to have faster and more data-driven decisions to increase the efficiency of businesses, which is achievable by using algorithms, advanced computing systems, and machine learning technology to generate more precise and actionable insights. The Adopt Drones Program will run in six phases and focus on solutions for 20 sectors, including agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare, and rural development.
AWS will be providing drone application developers support in multiple areas: technical review of solutions for cost and performance optimization, AWS Promotional Credits to enable developers to use the breadth and depth of AWS Cloud services to build, test and deploy their secure and scalable solutions on the cloud, and go-to-market support to help developers pitch the solution to large enterprises.
“The Adopt Drones Program is an exciting opportunity for drone application developers to experiment with AWS services in areas such as compute, analytics, and machine learning, and use available resources from AWS Partners to innovate,” said Rahul Sharma, President – Public Sector, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia. “The program will enable stakeholders in the drone ecosystem to collaborate, identify, and develop use cases, build prototypes, and help create a better understanding of the role of drones in improving citizen services.”
“We want to transform the common usage of drones from a data acquisition tool to an end-to-end solution capable of acquiring data as well as generating deep insights for business to leverage. This will enable regular usage of drones amongst large enterprises,” said Smit Shah – Director, DFI. “This program shall be an inflexion point for the drone industry. The program intends to experiment, develop and promote drone solutions with large enterprises. This program will create multiple business opportunities for solutions focused on creating actionable insights using drones.”
