3 things you missed at the AWS Summit

3 Things You Missed at the AWS Summit

 

Last week, I gave a keynote address at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney, an event bringing together more than 25,000 people from across Australia and New Zealand.

I presented alongside industry leaders to share how Swoop Aero leverages the AWS cloud-based infrastructure to generate value and impact.

Here are 3 things you didn’t know about our platform and how we use AWS cloud-based infrastructure.

1 – We pilot aircraft across the world from our Remote Operations Centre (ROC) in Melbourne

• The ROC enables one Swoop Aero pilot in Melbourne to control up to thirty aircraft across three continents beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS). This means pilots can remotely operate the aircraft beyond the physical view of the aircraft.
• Our aircraft are fully autonomous, meaning they are equipped with an onboard autopilot and maintain situational awareness at all times. The autopilot is supported by a computer-core monitoring system, which facilitates constant visibility of the aircraft’s status and health. This is important as we operate Beyond Line of Sight of our pilot, including in areas with poor or no network coverage. We do this by utilising 5G as well as satellite links connecting back to our platform in the cloud.
• The aircraft authenticate with Amazon Cognito and then maintain real-time Websockets connections via Amazon API gateway, allowing low latency communication across the globe.

 

2 – Our digital twins allow us to scale and operate a global fleet 

• In order to ensure we are able to operate a globally dispersed fleet in a safe and scalable way, we maintain a complete hardware and software digital twin of every aircraft within the global fleet.
• The aircraft itself consists of 17 modules, each with its own electrical ID assigned during manufacturing. We maintain an aircraft digital shadow in the cloud and throughout every module lifecycles it’s is tracked by matching specific flight data and trending that data using machine learning.
• The fleet’s digital twins are managed through a mix of AWS IoT Device Shadow Service and an Amazon Aurora PostgresSQL, with all aircraft performing automated checks against their twin and fleet managers accessing insights through online applications.

With the digital twin and a seamless flow of data, our integrated application ecosystem enables us to deliver safe drone logistics at scale.

3 – Our visual landing capability

• We are operating across diverse geographical locations, where communications and connectivity can be difficult. This is why our drones are able to decide whether it is safe to land without the input of a pilot.

This capability is enabled by computer vision technology based on our custom model, which has been trained in the cloud. we use Amazon Sagemaker Groundtruth and Amazon Mechanical Turk for data labelling and crowdsourcing, and Amazon Augmented AI to manage the workflow for human review. We leverage Amazon SageMaker for model training, and Amazon SageMaker Neo to optimise and convert that model for our target device.

• This allows us to easily deploy it to the drones in the field by using our over-the-air update capability. In recent weeks, this capability has enabled ship-to-shore landing in the Singapore Straits alongside our partner, Skyports.

 

At Swoop Aero, we have built more than just a drone. 

We have built a complete technology-enabled logistics service, encompassing hardware, software and technical expertise to make access to the skies seamless.

Through our close partnership with  AWS, Swoop Aero has gone from strength to strength in the global drone logistics industry and will continue to innovate integrated drone logistics and aviation to serve 1 billion people by 2030.