Revealed at this year’s AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas
INFRASTRUCTURE inspection can be a daunting and dangerous task, especially when it comes to remote or hard-to-reach areas–atop buildings or in jungles and atop mountains. Traditional methods of inspection, such as rope access and scaffolding, are often slow, expensive, and risky. However, a new technology is emerging that is revolutionizing the way infrastructure is inspected: data and drones.
At the most recent AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced a strategic partnership with Aerodyne, the leading global drone solutions provider. Aerodyne leverages AWS to operate its Dronos Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, facilitating the expansion of drone operators’ businesses worldwide.
The Malaysia-based company serves industries such as telecommunications, agriculture, surveillance, logistics, and energy across 45 countries. With its advanced end-to-end drone service platform, now combined with AWS capabilities the company enables users to onboard, analyze, and interpret drone data for optimized operations, increased efficiency, and secure aerial inspections.
Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be equipped with cameras, sensors, and other equipment to collect data about infrastructure. They can fly over and around structures, taking high-resolution images and videos that can be used to identify defects and assess damage. Drones can also be used to collect data for the creation of digital twins, which are virtual models of physical assets. Digital twins can be used to simulate the behavior of infrastructure, predict its performance, and optimize its maintenance.
The use of drones for infrastructure inspection is having a significant impact on the way infrastructure is maintained. Drones are helping to improve the safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of infrastructure maintenance. They are also helping to develop digital twins, which are providing new insights into the behavior and performance of infrastructure.
In the telecommunications sector, where monitoring and managing vast, remotely located infrastructure is critical for continual connectivity, Aerodyne’s drones automate the inspection of cell towers and antennae. This automation reduces labor time for manual inspections from two days to three hours, ensuring quicker verification of physical tower conditions and available space for new antennae.
Aerodyne’s collaboration with AWS focuses on creating a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), where drone data–comprising images, satellite imagery, agriculture data, and weather information–is transformed into actionable insights. Employing Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning (ML) service, Aerodyne automates the analysis of mobile phone towers and agricultural fields, enhancing the capabilities of industries such as telecommunications, energy, and precision farming.
As the technology continues to develop, drones are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable. They are now able to fly longer distances, carry heavier payloads, and operate in more demanding environments. This means that drones can be used to inspect a wider range of infrastructure, including bridges, roads, power lines, and pipelines. It can also be used in agriculture to addresses global food security challenges in the agriculture sector through a technology called precision farming.
The Dronos-powered Agrimor platform, developed with AWS, enables farmers to employ drones for tasks like seeding, spraying, plant analysis, and mapping, resulting in a significant increase in crop yields. The platform has been successfully utilized in Malaysia and Indonesia, with plans for expansion to Brazil, Pakistan, Gambia, and Senegal in the coming years.
Aerodyne’s growth trajectory includes doubling its revenue annually since its establishment in 2014. The company has responded to the surging demand for 5G cellular towers by deploying 5G antennae over 90% faster using ML on AWS. This has led to a substantial reduction in customers’ cellular tower operational costs by an average of 20% and manual data processing costs by more than 70%, compared to on-premises infrastructure.
Kamarul A. Muhamed, founder and group CEO at Aerodyne, highlighted the transformative impact of working with AWS, emphasizing the ability to address complex industrial challenges, expand globally, and deepen engagement within the drone community. Muhamed acknowledged the role of AWS in facilitating exponential growth by scaling workloads to meet rising user demand.
Looking ahead, Aerodyne plans to leverage AWS’s generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) capabilities to build a large language model. This model aims to assist companies in planning drone flights and visualizing close to 1 petabyte of drone data, incorporating insights from digital twins–virtual representations of physical infrastructure. Digital twins enable real-time centralized management of physical assets, offering timely preventive maintenance opportunities without service interruptions.
Conor McNamara, vice president of ASEAN at AWS, highlighted the global impact of AWS in supporting startups like Aerodyne, enabling them to transform into data-driven companies. McNamara emphasized the significance of Aerodyne’s innovative drone service and the transformative power of AI in addressing complex issues, such as food security.
AWS, committed to long-term engagement in Malaysia, is set to invest more than $6 billion in the country by 2037, with the AWS Region in Malaysia launching in 2024. The company has already trained over 50,000 Malaysian individuals in cloud skills since 2017. As part of its commitment to sustainability, AWS aims to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, contributing to a reduction in carbon emissions. A recent report by 451 Research, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence, underscores the environmental benefits of moving computing workloads to the cloud, showcasing improved energy efficiency and a reduction in carbon footprint by more than 78% for companies in the Asia Pacific Region (APAC).
