According to Bakthakolahalan Shyamsundar, Artificial Intelligence and Navigation Engineer at the ePlane Company, cloud technology has a multi-fold role to play in today’s development ecosystem. “We believe that autonomous technology will be one of the key factors in reducing operational costs and will help in making eVTOLs more commercially viable. Development of AI-based algorithms and processing large amounts of data is a crucial activity in the pursuit of Autonomous navigation,” he informed. AWS, with its broad set of cloud-based products—from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service—enables us to build and develop systems at a nimble pace,” added Shyamsundar.

“AWS also aids us financially as an early-stage startup by reducing the need for upfront capital expenditure on compute solutions. The kind of support, guidance and exposure we get by being a part of the AWS Activate Program for Startups is invaluable for us,” he noted.

According to Chakravarthy, the design and compactness of the e200 ensures that there is no additional infrastructure required at the takeoff/landing sites, making it more accessible and will allow quick on-boarding and offboarding. “The Indian government has already declared different zones for drone operations. A similar exercise would be adopted for aerial mobility for the class of e200 and above in due course. Until then, the present operating procedures for helicopters would suffice to handle a few 10s of aircraft per city and its vicinity. We are also closely involved with policy-making and certification right from the early stages,” he said.