Project Plan No 3.68 - Auscope partnership in the Australian Scalable Drones Cloud (ASDC)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones, provide sensing capabilities that address the critical scale-gap between ground and satellite-based observations, and offer a competitive advantage for researchers through the ability to deliver near real-time societally-relevant information. The recently awarded ARDC Australian Scalable Drones Cloud (ASDC) Platform will coalesce and establish a national best practice approach for experimental and scalable drone data analytics, driven by exemplar data-processing pipelines via a partnership of three NCRIS capability areas - Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF), AuScope and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), the Monash Drones Discovery Platform and CSIRO. The AuScope team at Monash University is entrusted with delivering Auscope's participation in the ASDC.

This project extends the existing Auscope Pilot DronesVL investment into the national cloud ecosystem for drones data processing being developed.
The DroneVL is a virtual desktop environment for advanced and bespoke drone data processing. The DronesVL reuses pioneering technology and methods developed by the Auscope SAM Underworld initiative, adapting them for the data-processing workloads of drones/UAVs. This project seeks to extend these capabilities into a scalable, cloud-native form. This approach novel and hence requires strong links to research activities and the application of innovative techniques and research infrastructure / eResearch knowledge.