Commercial drones are being used across various industries to help companies save money, improve safety, and enhance the efficiency of their respective operations. Drone industry is booming towards widespread sectors. Initially, drones were used for major projects or filmmaking, but they have taken up sectors like security, construction, agriculture, and other spread areas.
Construction site inspection has been carried out through drones. Similarly, the mining industry, one of the risky sectors, has been using drones to create maps of the mines. Major infrastructure surveys and inspections can be done within minutes with utter ease. This ensures enhanced and improved safety. Also, when talking about public security, law enforcement, fire departments, search, and rescue, all have adopted drone usage. The police department uses a drone to better situational awareness, map densely populated areas, and many more public safeties.
Drone delivery has been initiated in many cities for the supply of medicines and vaccines. Medicine delivery is soon going to be one of the increasing modes of delivery throughout the world.
Besides all the other industries, use of drone in agriculture has also started to rise in terms of spraying or mapping the land. The drone industry thus has a rapid rise as of now and is expected to be one of the most exciting industries in every individual aspect.
Passenger Drone Research Pvt Ltd. understands the power of drones and the social value they can create for society. In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Vishal Dharankar, CTO of PDRL shares his experience in the drone industry.
Following are the highlights of the interview.
Describe about Passenger Drone Research in detail.
PDRL, Passenger Drone Research Private Limited, is a drone software technology company offering one bucket software solution for multiple services, right from capturing data to processing it for analytics. We have services and products that empower drone missions and drone data analytics. We have built easy and efficient software for the drone industry via consistent efforts. Products are future-ready, meeting current needs while also evolving to meet future expectations. We are devoted to ensuring that consumers benefit from the most recent drone technology on the market and that drones are only used for lawful and profitable objectives.
Would you please brief us about the featured person and shed some light on his professional tenure?
“Drones are the Absolute Tomorrow”, Vishal Dharankar, CTO PDRL.
As a team, I and my fellow Partner Anil took into this industry after thoughtful considerations as per the demand of the market and youth. We gained knowledge, and we continue to explore the depth and potential of the software sector as technology is taking a way forward. With overall expertise of 16+ years in technical background and is associated with top brands like Nokia, also been awarded as Nokia Developer Champion, it feels great to have good exposure in this sector, which turns to be fruitful in our PDRL journey.
What kind of offerings/services do you provide to your clients?
We are offering AeroMegh SaaS platform, which provides multiple services to drone automation and drone data analytics, offering the below services:
- AeroGCS: It is drone management and mission planning software supporting various autopilots. It is simple yet unified such that users can learn in a few hours only. Its central capability is its seamless integration with the cloud. It is offered in three different editions. More information about AeroGCS can be found on http://aerogcs.com.
- AeroGCS Enterprise: It is made specifically for drone service providers to improve overall drone operations efficiency and productivity.
- AeroGCS OEM is explicitly made for drone manufacturers to scale their business to focus more on drone engineering, and AeroGCS will help them with Software Support.
- AeroStream: AeroStream is a SaaS for drone service operators, professionals, and individuals to deliver drone live streaming to viewers. AeroStream has end-to-end less than three seconds video streaming latency.
- AeroCapture: AeroCapture automates the end-to-end aerial image analytics process from capturing images by drones to processing images/videos using AI and ML technology. AeroCapture is a revolutionary product and saves 90% time of image processing captured by drones.
- AeroDelivery: AeroDelivery is an end-to-end software solution right from drone firmware, GCS software to cloud application for fleet management and delivery notifications.
What kind of challenges have you faced while entering the drone technology solution sector?
Business comes with deals and challenges. But changing the scenario of the challenges is what matters most. With thoughtful decisions and considerate time involved inputs, we knew we were never putting our foot down, and that has led us here today!
When we started, there were no regulations for the drone industry. Our investment was at high risk. Even though there were no regulations, we entered into this considering its values for society. And we are happy that we are one of them. We had set the foundation for the drone industry in India, which will benefit coming generations.
How was your firm/business affected in these pandemic times, and what were the steps you took to curb the damages, all the while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees?
We were established in later 2018, but we believe we could pull off as a team well. Pandemic has given us some bad memories, new learnings like sustainability methods and transformation skills. We transformed ourselves into a pandemic; we had to shut down some services and start new services too.
This proved as an opportunity to push ourselves off-limits to reach our potential. Safety was the first for sure. We took measures to communicate, discuss on the open forum, we let everyone put forth their thoughts, and yes, we are here today standing strong. Pandemic taught us about the fact that united, we stand and continue to do so for everything we will execute.
What would you like to advise the young generation of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who want to venture into drone technology solutions?
As per global predictions and our predictions, the drone industry will grow massively in Indian and across the globe. It has tremendous opportunities to invent and be a leader in the world for social benefits. As a country, we have limited achievement in the aerospace industry, and this is a golden opportunity to invest, hardware and become the global leader in drones.
The drone industry is growing day by day, and this technology has started touching our daily lives. As the industry grows, more skilled professionals will be required. This creates an opportunity for individuals, institutes, training centers, and drone manufactures and other entities to help make more qualified professionals. Creating a win-win situation, we have come up with a certification program that will help generate more drone professionals with an edge and to stand apart.
Creating more business and job opportunities in the drone industry is the primary purpose of our certification program. This program helps create more skilled professionals in the industry, simultaneously generating business opportunities for training partners.
Where do you envision PDRL to be in the long run? What are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in your industry?
Our main goal and motto are to create more time to live. We believe in advancing the technology such that it will save time by minimizing efforts. We firmly have established the thoughts in our mind that drones are the future. Each sector is going to take a boom from infrastructure, logistics to agriculture. The drone market will reach out each bit and help us live our lives with minimum effort and save time. Our products are made for the global market, and we already see international customers started using our products.
What is the current industrial scenario of the drone technology solution sector?
Drones are being used to deliver vaccines, the agricultural purpose of inspection and spraying, monitoring highways and roads and many more. Challenging and risky tasks are being performed with ease and lesser effort. The software solutions are getting advanced. Reports and analytics are generated in real-time. This makes the process even more effective. There are software solutions that provide end-to-end image capturing, processing and analytics. Here, we see and visualize the high demand of the technology solution sector. We believe drones will touch every industry as the drone can be a toy in the home to warfare game-changer in the defense sector.
