Drones provide sensing capabilities that address the critical scale-gap between ground and satellite-based observations.
Drone operations capture large amounts of data — far beyond an individual’s capability to manage without tools and systems to support the coordination of storage, information exchange, exploration and processing.
The Australian Scalable Drone Cloud (ASDC) project worked on establishing a national ecosystem for drone data management operating on FAIR principles.
The project aimed to integrate sensing capabilities with easy-to-use storage, processing, analysis and visualisation tools, transforming research-led contributions of data and tools into a drone data commons.
This would offer a competitive advantage for researchers through the ability to deliver near real-time, societally relevant information from live drone-acquired data.
The ASDC aimed to develop cloud-native drone data management and analytics capabilities for different imaging systems including hyperspectral, multispectral and RGB. Visualisation tools include interactivity with point cloud data in virtual and augmented reality.
Scalable containerised data management tools would enable upload, download and the provision of persistent links to sharing datasets easily.
The project aimed to develop best-practice drone-data processing pipelines for 5 different use cases, which multiple research communities can reuse, promoting data standardisation.
The ASDC was unable to be realised by this project and was decommissioned.
