Sanitation, aerial alerts make drones new soldiers in war against Covid-19

They are being used throughout the country to spray disinfectants, manage crowds, spread awareness through public announcements and for geo-mapping to chalk out containment zones

Drones, which were mostly limited only to wedding photography or spraying pesticides over farms earlier, are becoming the eyes of the administration amid the Covid-19 outbreak to monitor areas.

The blanket-ban on drones which was lifted by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in 2018, has been utilised throughout the country for effectively spraying disinfectants, surveillance, crowd management, spreading awareness through public announcements and also geo-mapping to chalk-out containment zones.  

Mumbai Police, for example, has deployed around 50 drones all over the city, in association with the Drone Federation of India. "The drones are doing surveillance for the police, and the images, videos captured by them are directly fed to the Mumbai Police Control Room," said Smit Shah, Director-Partnerships, DFI. The drone operators cover a radius of 500 metres on an average, and spot violations of social distancing norm.

Also, DFI has three teams working on-ground in densely-populated slum areas such as Malvani and Dharavi to assist the police and fly speaker-enabled drones to spread awareness on social distancing and staying indoors, in Marathi and Hindi.

Chennai-based Garuda Aerospace is executing drone-based sanitisation operations across 26 cities including that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency of Varanasi. The start-up, with an aggregated 300 drones and 500 operators under its fold, is working with several state governments in spraying disinfectants, conducting aerial surveillance using thermal cameras and geo-mapping.  

“We have also started to build preliminary testing using geo-mapping drones to map COVID-19 hotspots in Tamil Nadu. This will help the government identifying hotspots accurately after plotting the number of cases in a particular area,” said Agnishwar Jayaprakash, founder, Garuda Aerospace. “We also plan to manufacture around 100-150 drones with the help of startup incubation cell at Agni Institute of Technology, Chennai, and train 100 mechatronics students who had come forward to volunteer.” The drones are equipped with 80 per cent auto-pilot capacity and hence manual training becomes quicker and easier, he added.

An indigenously built drone can cover around 50-60 acres on an average for sanitisation purposes with 20 litres of disinfectants and a fly time of 35-40 minutes. “These are hybrid drones that can work with fuel and battery. It is because of these enhanced features we had the advantage to bag multiple orders across various states,” said Jayprakash. A drone can cover around 20 kilometres in a day as compared to 4-5 kilometres by a sanitation worker who also exposes himself to infections in the process.

Garuda Aerospace is also working with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department and has deployed five drones in Sathyamangalam and Mudhumalai forests to prevent animal-human conflicts and poaching. The drones are fitted with speakers and mimic low-frequency sounds of a lion or a tiger to prevent elephants from coming into the villages or avert rail-related accidents.

Hyderabad-based Thanos has worked in association with the Collector's office in Sangareddy District in Telangana to spray disinfectant aerially. “The aim is to spray disinfectants in places that are inaccessible or risky for manual access. The drone is flown around 100-150 metre radius and 15 metres altitude for disinfectant spraying,” said Pradeep Palelli, co-founder and CEO, Thanos. The drone can fly 15-20 minutes at a stretch on a single charge of a battery. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) norms state a drone cannot fly above 400 feet.  

Thanos, one of the few indigenous drone manufacturers in India, will be participating in Telangana’s “Medicine From The Sky” initiative. Through this programme, the government is looking at delivering blood and vital medicine supplies via drones, especially in rural areas. The pilot is scheduled to take place this year.

Thanos also has surveillance drones with live-streaming capability over the internet, and custom drones that can be fitted with loudspeakers for crowd control. Some of its drones also carry thermal cameras for temperature monitoring or night time monitoring. The company has expressed interest to the Telangana government to deploy such drones amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Palelli added.

The Civil Aviation Ministry, earlier this year, also pushed for the owners to voluntarily register and obtain Drone Acknowledgement Number (DAN) and an Ownership Acknowledgement Number (OAN) by January-end. The process had to be done through its Digital Sky portal, as envisaged in the Drone policy.