India’s drone tech sector set to soar in coming years, says Reliance firm Asteria Aerospace

Asteria Aerospace leads India's drone tech growth with government support, diverse industry applications, and innovative cloud platform.

Asteria Aerospace, a full-stack drone technology firm based in Bengaluru, said India’s drone tech sector has been growing at 40% CAGR in the last three years and in the coming years it was set to soar higher with the government liberalising the sector and enterprises increasingly finding drone applications in newer industry verticals.

Neel Mehta, Director & Co-Founder of Asteria Aerospace, said, with the government liberating drone operations, the technology has been finding a wide variety of applications in the civilian market.

‘’Industries such as GIS (Geographic Information System), construction, oil & gas, agriculture, infrastructure etc are increasingly embracing drone tech and capturing aerial data for actionable intelligence and decision making,’‘ he explained.

Reliance Industries invested ₹120 crore in 2019 to pick up 75% equity in Asteria Aerospace. The drone tech firm currently has a drone deployment base of 650 and holds 42 patents depending on the design and flying capabilities. Some of these drones carry out surveying and mapping to generate digital surface and terrain models for topography and land use analysis while certain drones are deployed in crop health assessment and digitisation of farm boundaries. Construction segment uses drones to capture real-time insights through remote management while drones deployed in oil and gas firms remotely inspect infrastructure and detect any anomalies or leaks in pipelines, according to Mehta.

‘’Customers are seeing huge time and cost reduction with drone deployments. In terms of crop health assessments we are able to deliver in plant stand counting with a 95% accuracy,’‘ he added.

According to him, land parcels, farms, villages, towns and cities across the country are getting digitalised for rural and urban planning and land record management, and drones are going to be deployed in all these products.

Asteria was founded by class mates Neel Mehta and Nihar Varthak in 2012, when drone technology was still at a very nascent stage. The firm that employs 320 people announced the introduction of SkyDeck, a cloud platform, that would help customers to streamline drone management with its pre-built industry specific AI models that can quickly analyse aerial data, claimed the company.