SUMMARY
Drone Federation of India has signed an MoU with AWS
AWS will become the preferred partner for providing cloud service to drone companies
DFI will work with AWS to provide cloud infrastructure to drone startups
With the aim to support the drone ecosystem in India, the Drone Federation of India (DFI), on Monday (January 6), signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Amazon’s cloud service arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the Drone Festival of India 2020.
With this partnership, AWS will become the preferred partner for providing cloud service to drone companies in India. AWS will also help in the development and innovation process of these companies as well.
According to Livemint, DFI, which is a non-profit industry body, will work with AWS to provide cloud infrastructure to drone manufacturing companies. The partnership will also work towards helping drone companies to develop their applications and stay up to date in evolving technologies.
Rahat Kulshreshtha, President of DFI said that AWS was a natural choice for us which will help drone manufacturers and developers. According to Kulshreshtha, AWS’ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities are unmatched.
Moreover, the tie-up between DFI and AWS will also work in identifying new use cases for drone applications in India. Some of the use cases at which the collaboration will be looking are land survey, precision agriculture, search and rescue missions, and disaster management. Additionally, it will also work in building new custom cloud-based applications of drones.
Rahul Sharma, President of the India and South Asia Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services, belives that drones are going to be extensively used for agriculture, healthcare, smart cities’ purposes. “With industry-leading compute, storage, database, internet-of-things (IoT), AI and ML, drone developers and operators can now test new ideas quickly, and accelerate innovation,” Sharma added.
According to Kulshreshtha, India has close to 100 drone startups and he believes that the autonomous drone aviation industry has great potential ahead. Recently, a Pune and Silicon Valley-based drone startup FlytBase, in December 2019, raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from US-based, early-stage venture capitalists and angel investors.
According to BIS Research, global market intelligence and advisory firm, the Indian drone market is expected to stand at $885.7 Mn by 2021. At the same time, the global opportunity is estimated to touch $21.47 Bn during this period.
