The evolution of artificial intelligence augurs well for the drone industry as it will bring in more automation and intelligence, according to Kamarul A Muhammed, Founder and CEO of Malaysia’s global drone services company Aerodyne Group.
“If you look at the evolution of the industry, drones were manually operated and piloted from the ground at the beginning. Now, the advent of AI has brought more autonomy to the sector,” he said speaking in a panel discussion on the second day of Beyond Expo in Macao.
Drones have now become better physically and they can now fly by themselves. But they need to have the intelligence of how they will do their own operations. If we can develop an AI model that can understand the environment and the assets, drones can do far more effective work. At the end of the day, the real value lies in how we make a meaningful impact on society, he said.
AI can also automate the process of extracting intelligence from data that drones gather. It will make a significant impact on the industry. Aerodyne has developed an AI model that has helped reduce the amount of time taken by a drone to carry out the inspection of a telecom tower from 136 hours to just under 15 minutes, Muhammed added further.
“We carry out inspections of thousands of telecom towers the world over. We used to spend manually or automatically applying and capturing the data. It would require a long time for engineers to process the data and gain insights from it. Over the past year and a half, we spent a lot of effort automating this process and developing an AI model and intelligence system. As a result, we have been able to reduce the number of hours taken to process the inspection of a single tower from 136 hours to less than 15 minutes,” he claimed.
AI can also lead to swarm intelligence. In the past, a single drone would go out and fly piloted by an individual and then another team would fly another drone doing another work. If we can use AI to swarm all these tools together, they can communicate and collaborate with each other to make it far more efficient, the Aerodyne CEO shared.
Ingredients for success in modern SEA
Muhammed also talked about the key ingredients for startups to be successful in modern Southeast Asia. In his opinion, startups need to look at what key problem they solve and then find the key gaps in society that they can make a significant impact on, find and develop the right technology, and build the right team to deliver the solution.
According to Techsauce Co-Founder and CEO Oranuch Lerdsuwankij, to be successful in a fragmented region of 650 million people, it is crucial to understand the local culture and the behaviour of each market.
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In her opinion, there are massive opportunities for SMEs to be converted into tech startups. Southeast Asia’s second and third generations of SME owners are looking to transform their family-run businesses into tech startups. Most of them have domain expertise.
“If we take the construction or food & agriculture industry, the second or the third generation of people who study abroad come back and see that digitalisation can help them transform their family businesses and leverage technology to transform them. This presents great opportunities for startups in Southeast Asia,” Lerdsuwankij said.
The session was moderated by Jumpstart Executive Chairman James Kwan. Ling Xiangliang, Deputy CEO, ESCO Lifesciences Group also participated in the session.
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