DFI and AWS roll out Adopt Drones Program

The Drone Federation of India in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday announced the Adopt Drones Program.

The programme, aimed to boost innovation in artificial intelligence-driven drones as well as to make use of data collected by unmanned aerial systems, will have six phases focusing on solutions for 20 sectors including agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare, and rural development.

“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,” Smit Shah, director, DFI, said in a statement.

Winning developers will be backed and mentored by AWS in multiple aspects including technical reviewing of solutions for cost and performance optimization. The cloud giant will also offer developers AWS promotional credits to help them build, test and deploy their solutions on the cloud, according to the statement. The programme will also provide go-to-market support to help developers pitch the solution to large enterprises.

Read: Food delivery via drones a distant dream as govt issues new UAS rules

“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,”  Rahul Sharma, president-public sector, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia added.

The non-government body recently signed a memorandum of understanding with AWS cloud services, declaring the latter as their preferred cloud services partner to accelerate innovation in the drone ecosystem.

According to a report by 6Wresearch, India is among the top countries for UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) imports, accounting for about 20% of the global UAV imports. India’s UAV market, as per the report, was projected to grow at 18% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between 2017-23.