Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) is partnering with Bell and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve the safety of autonomous take-offs and landings. This is a critical step toward a future where drones can fly without operator involvement. DDC’s goal is to use ultra low-latency real time video recognition and analytics capabilities to enable their technology platform to assess the situation and independently decide if it’s safe to take off or land. To achieve this, DDC requires nearly instantaneous video analytics and calculations – capabilities that require the speed and ultra low latency of a 5G network and multi access edge computing (MEC).
Bell’s Public MEC with AWS Wavelength solves these issues by offloading the workload from the drone to the cloud services at the edge of Bell’s 5G network, leveraging the power of computing in the cloud. The drones being tested are also equipped with ultra-light, purpose-built onboard communication devices so that they can maintain constant contact with the Bell 5G network and take full advantage of its high speed and low latency.
Drone Delivery Canada has been able to increase drone precision in navigating and landing, thanks to enhanced spatial recognition and decision-making capabilities provided by Bell Public MEC’s real-time video analytics.