The future is in drones

Imagine this — your parents are on the ground floor and instead of coming upstairs to check if you are studying or not, they send a drone with a camera.

While this might not be the reality in many homes today, Maryala Srinivas and Madarapu Santhosh Kumar say that in the next 10 years this could be a common scenario.

The duo that won the TiE Smash Up event held in the city recently and received a funding of Rs 15 lakh say they are in “the business of the future”. They design, make and assemble drones.

While they import drone parts from Hong Kong and China, they design the heart of the drone — the flight controller — themselves. “We design flight controllers and also sensor modules. There can be various types of sensors installed in drones, like LPG sensor (it can detect if there’s a leakage in the LPG pipeline), accelerometers (motion sensors) and even speech recognition. Of course, gyro-sensors are also installed,” says Srinivas.

The drones are in the price range of Rs 30,000 to Rs 2,00,000. Talking about what makes them expensive, Srinivas says, “It depends on the number of features installed. Usually, the costlier ones can fly up to 2 km and have GPS — if signal is lost it can return to the owner — and also high resolution cameras.”

In the business for over eight months now, at the Smash Up event they spoke about the market scope for drones and their strength. “Recently, NASA had released a statement that in the near future each and every home would have a drone. Soon drones will be used in various fields — medical, online delivery service etc. We have seen the use of drones by police for manning a particular area where a large crowd has gathered. All of this will eventually be-come ve-ry common,” says Santhosh.

Currently, drones are also used by engineering students for training purposes or for photography. And these two are the areas where the duo, who have been friends since Class VI, have been focusing on.

“We also have drone training kits. We used to train engineering students and realised they faced a lot of difficulty in procuring different parts for the drones. And the kits were not student-friendly. So, we decided to support the students by getting these kits, which are sort of DIY kits. Currently, there are no separate labs for drones,” says Srinivas.

Functioning in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana alone, they have sold over 30 drones in the past few months and have also sold 1,500 training kits.

“Winning the TiE Smash up and getting the funding was an encouragement for us. Now, we can go national,” says Santhosh, while Srinivas adds, “We have been able to sell all this without having a website. Now, with the funding we are going to first create an e-commerce website for people all over India.”