The Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has granted exemptions to two consortia led by ANRA Technologies for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) UAS operations in India.

The only company to receive approvals for both its consortia, ANRA Technologies will initially focus on delivering food items in the cities of Ropar and Etah.

The ANRA-led consortium includes partners such as Swiggy, which is one of India’s largest online food delivery platforms. The Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, and drone service provider BetterDrones will work together on the endeavor.

The BVLOS operations are scheduled to begin in mid-July, subject to easing of COVID-19 restrictions. For India, these operations will serve as a way of fast-tracking its unmanned systems policy and preparing the local industry for a major push into the drone services segment across the world.

“ANRA is honored to lead two consortia for BVLOS experimentation with partners that have commercial and humanitarian use cases to advance drone operations for India,” says Amit Ganjoo, CEO at ANRA Technologies.

“Our initial operations will focus on delivering consumable items on-demand to residents in and around IIT Campus in Ropar in partnership with Swiggy.”

Using the Swiggy App powered by the SmartSkies family of UTM and drone delivery solutions, Swiggy customers can place on-demand orders for snacks, food items, beverages and other essentials. Flights can be tracked in real time using the platform, which allows customers to know exactly when their delivery will arrive. Orders are immediately processed and delivered to the nearest launch site where the package is transferred to a drone and flown to a predetermined drop site within an eight square kilometer area. A Swiggy driver will then make the final delivery via motorcycle to the customer’s doorstep.

ANRA Technologies says that it wants to leverage its experience to: “help define technology-agnostic protocols to support interaction and data exchange between suppliers of UTM services; determine suitability and applicability of existing technology capabilities; understand trade-offs between interoperability and open implementations and any specific technical integration requirements for functionality; determine acceptable performance envelopes for latency, reliability, availability times and ‘near real-time’ aspects of communications; and establish how other key emerging standards, particularly Remote-ID and Detect and Avoid (DAA) standards, may be integrated as part of an overall Digital Sky UTM approach.”

The BVLOS operations will be enabled by ANRA SmartSkies CTR and SmartSkies delivery platforms. SmartSkies is a coordinated, scalable, and highly adaptable family of software services that provides execution and management of drone operations in controlled and uncontrolled airspace, which helps ensure the safety of the National Airspace and seamless integration into the legacy ATC systems.

ANRA notes that it has also designed an “innovative feature” for secure two-way text communication between drone pilots and airport towers. Only authorized tower personnel will be able to communicate with drone pilots using SmartSkies technology, which helps improve coordination during emergencies.

The ANRA platform is designed to be flexible so it can evolve as the trade space changes and matures. This, ANRA says, will allow regulators to maintain their authority over the airspace while permitting industry to manage operations in areas authorized for UAS flight.