Establishing a national ecosystem for drone data management, integrating sensing capabilities with easy-to-use storage, processing, visualisation and data analysis tools (including computer vision and deep learning techniques), and transforming research-led data and tools contributions into a drones data commons.
Unmanned Aerial Systems or Vehicles (UAS), commonly known as 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 Establishing Australia’s Scalable Drone Cloud (ASDC) project will establish a national ecosystem for drone data management operating on FAIR principles. This will offer a competitive advantage for researchers through the ability to deliver near real-time societally-relevant information from live drone-acquired data.

Core features



Who is this project for?
- Researchers
- Farmers and industry
- Environmental managers
- Government (state and commonwealth)
What does this project enable?
The ASDC will enable Australian research to move towards a common platform to manage and access drone data, reuse processing pipelines, implement best practice information architecture with cloud-native and HPC solutions, and collaborate with the international community at a platform level instead of individual domain level. The ASDC will also enable wider use of research using drone data by multiple research communities.
Handy resources
- Try Drone mapping software, OpenDroneMap.org
- Utilise ecocloud for cloud based computing tailored to ecological data and researchers.
- Explore Monash University’s Drone Discovery Platform (MDDP)
- Visit the Adelaide University Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility (URAF)
Other groups and people working with drone, LiDAR and near remote sensing data:
- Airborne Research Australia (ARA)
- Scott Chapman’s group at UQ and the Centre for Crop Science
- Arko Lucieer and TerraLuma (UTas)
- Pablo J. Zarco-Tejada and Hypersens facility at Uni Melbourne