Swiggy and drone company ANRA Technologies have started with their trials for drone deliveries in India, as per the recent announcement.
Commencing Drone Trials
The announcement came after getting clearance from the stakeholders from the Ministry of Defense (MoD), Directorate General of Aviation (DGCA), and Ministry of Civil Aviation (MOCA) for the ANRA Technologies-led consortium to begin trials for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations in India.
ANRA’s flight team has already planned to launch its first sortie on June 16, 2021, as they have gone through months of planning, risk assessments, air traffic control integration, training, equipment preparation, and coordination.
Further saying that “For the next several weeks, the flight team will conduct BVLOS food and medical package deliveries in the Etah and Rupnagar districts using ANRA SmartSkies technology,.”
Futuristic Approach
“With an increasing number of technological innovations taking place to smoothen and fasten the last mile journey, it only becomes natural for us to explore the latest avenues available to maximize the benefit to our consumers. We are excited about the potential that drones offer and look forward to the trials on BVLOS operations for the use case of food delivery. Through our association with ANRA, we aim to put the long-range proficiencies of drone technology to best use and accomplish some ground-breaking trials,” said Shilpa Gnaneshwar, Principal Programme Manager, Swiggy.
The BVLOS delivery operations are enabled by ANRA SmartSkies CTR and SmartSkies DELIVERY platforms. These platforms provide execution and management of drone operations in controlled and uncontrolled airspace.
They also ensure the safety of the Indian National Airspace and helps in a seamless integration into the country’s legacy Air Traffic Control systems.
What Is The Plan?
The Government of India’s MOCA has approved only one UAS technology provider so far for leading two consortiums, as per a statement.
Out of these two, one consortium consists of ANRA, along with their partners Swiggy, Indian Institute of Technology – Ropar, and Better Drones, which is a drone service provider, which will collectively focus on food delivery.
While the second consortium consisted of ANRA and the Indian Institute of Technology – Ropar will mainly focus on medical deliveries.
Apart from that, the consortia also will seek to identify any trade-offs between interoperability and open implementations and specific technical compatibility requirements for functionality.
At the same e time, determining acceptable performance envelopes for latency, reliability, availability times, and ‘near real-time’ aspects of communications.
In addition to that, it will also seek to understand how other critical emerging technologies, including Remote-ID and Detect and Avoid (DAA), may be incorporated as part of an overall Digital Sky UTM framework.
With this development, India is looking at the operations to fast-track its policies in preparing the domestic industry for a significant push into the drone services segment globally.