Indian drone startup sets worldclass benchmarks

Aarav Unmanned Systems (AUS) provides professional drones for enterprises. The functions range from GIS survey and mapping to helping with precision agriculture and industrial inspection. The team comprising of mostly IIT alumni, are passionate about building the future of drones and their applications in the enterprise segment. Explaining the work that they do, Vipul Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Aarav Unmanned Systems says, “We provide end-to-end drone based solutions for enterprise applications in mining, infrastructure, urban planning, irrigation, energy and agriculture.”

The startup was incubated at the SIDBI Innovation and Incubation Centre (SIIC) at IIT-Kanpur in 2013 by Vipul Singh, Suhas Banshiwala and Yeshwanth Reddy. Singh mentions that a common interest in aero-modeling and robotics brought the AUS team together. The team designs and develops UAV-based solutions using proprietary drone technology.

The flagship product of AUS is Insight-PPK, an indigenous survey grade PPK GPS-based and it is the only company to manufacture a specific technology and it’s a fully autonomous drone. “The drones are operated through a computer software developed by AUS and according to the needs of the industry or client, the flight controls and image sensors on the drones are customised,” informs Singh, adding that drones at AUS are constantly setting world-class tech benchmarks due to tremendous efforts on drone intelligence, hardware optimisation, design innovation and data analytics for the last four years of its existence.

“Having mapped more than 4.5 Lac acres of area and served key players like Coal India, Hindalco, JSW group, L&T, Adani, Vedanta and multiple state governments across the verticals, AUS is already the leader of commercial drones in India and now moving towards establishing the same in other countries,” mentions Singh.

The target customer segment for the company includes both private and government organisations into mining, urban/rural planning and development, road/railway development, irrigation infrastructure design and development. Focusing on the benefits to customers, Singh states, “Our solution offers five times decrease in data collection time with atleast 1000 times more data density/details and best in class data accuracy. For example, our solution can deliver 98 per cent accuracy in volume estimation for mining industry vs 85-90 per cent accuracy delivered by conventional techniques and map 100s of villages with upto 2 cm/pixel resolution within a couple of weeks.”

Highlighting that the aim of team AUS has always been solving large and complex mapping related problems using drones, Singh remarks that this involves innovations at multiple fronts including the inhouse developed fully autonomous survey-grade drones, flight planning software and algorithms, solution workflow and data analytics to extract relevant information for different use cases and industry sectors. “Our future plan includes improving all the layers of the solution step by step and increasing the benchmark industry is working with. This will include deeper data analytics and use case specific solutions,” acknowledges Singh.

Pointing out that very recently the Government of India has introduced regulations for the operation and manufacturing of drones in India, Singh remarks, “This will open a great opportunity for business in India to both provide and consume drone-based solutions.” He asserts that it is necessary that all the startups follow these rules and compliances to help build a sustainable and health ecosystem.

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