By Srinath Srinivasan
With India’s own drone portal, DigitalSky, and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) actively involved in developing guidelines and issuing licenses to drone pilots, indigenous manufacturers are looking for deeper and more meaningful entry points into this market. VFLYX, a Bangalore-based manufacturer of customized UAV/drones with in-house hardware and on-board flight software engineering teams, is working on the larger drones.
“While it is more common to import micro and small drones, doing so for larger ones is inefficient and costly. We intend to import only those components that are not readily available locally and to build the remainder ourselves,” VFLYX co-founder and CEO Vishal Saurav says.
Large drones can assist in large-scale agriculture, firefighting, and load transportation in industries, among other critical missions. “We are currently working on land surveys, surveillance of large industrial complexes, and remote monitoring with live feed,” Saurav explains. The company owns the design intellectual property for all of its drones. “When we manufacture drones large enough to carry payloads in India, the cost drops by more than 40%,” Saurav explains. “We intend to establish channel partners in order to penetrate deeper into India’s various markets.”
VFLYX will support the drones for the duration of their lives and will continue to develop software updates. On the software side, the startup specializes in artificial intelligence capabilities for drones and client applications.
Source: Financial Express
