TCS opens research centre on drone use in US

Country's largest IT exporter TCS today said it has opened a special facility in Ohio, US to conduct research on drone usage across industries.
"Forward-thinking companies worldwide are at different stages of exploring drone technology to reimagine existing operational processes and transform the way they do business," its chief technology officer K Ananth Krishnan said.
The TCS Drones Research Lab at Cincinnati's Seven Hills Park Innovation Center includes indoor labs, showcase, warehouse, and outdoor terrain footprints, a company statement said.
The lab provides experimentation and co-innovation environment for customers to build solutions for specific industry problems in accelerated 30-60-90-day delivery cycles, it added.

It can be noted that the unmanned aerial vehicles are being used for an array of applications, including warehouse management, ecommerce deliveries and electric transmission lines checking, among others.
Within India, there has been a drone-based delivery done by a pizza chain, but the high amount of regulations with flying is said to be impeding the progress.

The TCS statement said its drone pilots are FAA part 107 certified and fly fully-equipped drones to collect data for specific industry use cases.
"Advanced computer vision, machine learning and deep learning algorithms enable fully automated processing of the drone captured images to reveal precise insights," it said.

The Tata group company had established the Seven Hills Park in 2008 as a center for advanced technologies to provide services and solutions to address local customers' business challenges.
Spread over a 223-acre campus, the facility employs 1,000 people at present.