ANRA Technologies, a UTM company based in Washington DC, has announced that a little over a year after India announced plans to allow experimental long-range drone flights, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has granted exemptions to two consortia led by ANRA Technologies to operate drones for BVLOS operations in the country. ANRA is the only company to receive approvals for both its consortia will focus on delivery of essential health supplies such as life-saving drugs, blood and on food delivery.
According to a company statement:
“The ANRA led consortium includes partners like Swiggy, one of India’s biggest food delivery platforms, the renowned Indian Institute of Technology and Better Drones, a drone service provider. These BVLOS operations are likely to begin in the first week of July subject to easing of the COVID restrictions. India is looking at these operations as a way of fast tracking its policy and preparing the local industry for a major push into the drone services segment globally. ANRA Technologies hopes to leverage it prior experience to
- help define technology agnostic protocols to support interaction and data exchange between suppliers of UTM services,
- determine suitability and applicability of existing technology capabilities,
- understand trade-offs between interoperability and open implementations and any specific technical integration requirements for functionality,
- determine acceptable performance envelopes for latency, reliability, availability times and ‘near real-time’ aspects of the communications,
- establish how other key emerging standards, particularly Remote-ID and Detect and Avoid (DAA) standards, may be integrated as part of an overall Digital Sky UTM approach.
All these BVLOS operations will be enabled by ANRA SmartSkies™ CTR as well as SmartSkies™ Delivery platforms – software services that provide execution and management of drone operations in controlled and uncontrolled airspace ensuring the safety of the national airspace and seamless integration into the legacy ATC systems.
“Additionally, ANRA has added a feature for secure two-way text communication between drone pilots and airport towers,” says the company. “Only authorized tower personnel will be able to communicate with drone pilots using SmartSkies™ technology, helping to improve coordination during emergencies. The ANRA platform is designed to be flexible so it can evolve as the trade space changes and matures, allowing regulators to maintain its authority over the airspace, while permitting industry to manage operations in areas authorized for UAS flight.
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