(Nov 30): Aerodyne group is set to run its DRONOS software as a service (SaaS) platform on Amazon Web Services to help drone operators worldwide grow their businesses.
DRONOS is an end-to-end drone service platform that allows users to onboard, analyse and make sense of drone data to optimise operations, drive efficiencies and conduct aerial inspections.
Notably, Aerodyne operates drone solutions for telecommunications, agriculture, surveillance, logistics and energy industries in 45 countries.
“DRONOS is a drone operating system. When you fly drones, you need to have expertise [whether] for the pilot or crew to process the data. We want to democratise this. Rather than relying on some experts, we are putting all of this within DRONOS,” said Kamarul A Mohamed, founder and group CEO of Aerodyne.
“It means that anybody can then get drone intelligence and data intelligence. It’s not just drones. You can take satellite data, ground data, you can go out and take your own photos and dump them into the system. We can then extract intelligence for you to make the right decisions on time and every time.
“The whole idea is to connect the whole ecosystem seamlessly for everyone. We are proud to be working with AWS to bring this technology to the market.”
Using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Aerodyne created a data lake on AWS to store and turn drone data into actionable insights. Furthermore, using Amazon SageMaker, Aerodyne has been able to automate analysis on mobile phone towers and farm fields.
Aerodyne has also reduced its customers' cellular tower operational costs by an average of 20% by using AWS. Additionally, manual data processing costs have reduced by more than 70% compared to on-premises infrastructure.
Aerodyne’s move with AWS will allow them to get to market faster. By leveraging on AWS, Aerodyne will be able to accelerate their plans to deliver DRONOS which initially would have taken about 18 months, said Kamarul.
“In the past, we grew with mergers and acquisition (M&A) strategies. We started this in 2018, and up to now we have completed 21 M&As. Those give us boots on the ground and leadership in the different regions. With the release of this new technology, we do not need boots on the ground. We are 'uberising' this if you like,” he said.
“Our competitors [can] now be our pilots, they can be doing the flying themselves, and we are enabling more people to get into this. We cannot be in 150 countries by ourselves. With the rollout of DRONOS we can work with any company,”
“We will enable them to serve these complex requirements with complex customers, which they otherwise would not have been able to serve. By working with established names such as AWS, it gives us the structure to give the conviction and confidence to the end user that this is all running in a secure environment.”
Kamarul also said he aims to bring data intelligence to every corner of the world without having to physically be there. Aerodyne will have a certification programme for small drone companies, or mom and pop drone companies, as Kamarul put it, to enable them to operate different types of projects.
Aerodyne also plans to experiment with AWS’s generative artificial intelligence capabilities to build a large language model. This will be able to help companies to better plan drone flights and visualise close to one petabyte of drone data.