What is the Australian Scalable Drone Cloud?
Australia's Scalable Drone Cloud will help researchers process and manage data generated by drone-borne instruments at scale. It will accelerate research and decision making through a cloud-hosted platform, and by developing new methods for extracting insights from data.
Overview
Australian Scalable Drone Cloud (ASDC) is exactly as its name suggests - a scalable open-source platform for users of drone data. It delivers nationally accessible infrastructure for drone-related research and innovation across a range of disciplines including Earth, plant and environmental sciences, as well as archaeology.
It will create a seamless pipeline of data from capture through to publishing by integrating:
Data management and storage tools
A structure-from-motion engine (a technique to obtain reliable data of real-world objects by creating 3D models from photos)
A python coding environment
Data visualisation and interrogation tools
A drone data discovery dashboard for publishing and sharing of data.
All this is delivered through an online web interface and hosted on scalable computing hardware.
Figure 1: a simple visualised demonstration of how the ASDC takes drone data and turns it into publishable research
A platform for diverse users / everyone
Whilst aimed at researchers, the platform’s objective is to service all aspects of the Australian drone user community, including citizen scientists, NGOs, and government. We aim to transform the already substantial drone data processing capabilities of these organisations towards best-practice, automation, innovation, and intelligent decision making.
The ASDC will have the ability to ingest and name different data types including pre-processed maps, models, point clouds, and digital surface models processed in other software, raw photogrammetry photos, LiDAR point clouds, videos, and multispectral datasets. Users will be able to input and export their data at any point along the workflow. This design provides the freedom to exploit the specific toolsets the platform provides that are relevant to their work without having to be tied to the full processing workflow. The design also provides a completely integrated workflow and data pipeline option.
Making drone data FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable
The platform is being built with the goal of accelerating widespread adoption of FAIR Principles for drone-acquired data from the point of capture to publication. The FAIR Principles stand for Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability, and describe a useful framework for thinking about sharing and management of digital assets. By adopting the FAIR principals, the ASDC will maximise the use and reuse of digital assets for users.
ASDC is a 3-year project supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy organisations ARDC, TERN, APPF and AuScope, together with CSIRO that commenced in the third quarter of 2020. Since then, development of the various components and integrations of the ASDC platform has been shared across the partners.
The beta version of the platform is expected for release in Q4 2022 with additional features, tools, and improvements to be delivered in the intervening 12 months before the formal release of the platform in Q4 2023.
We’d like to hear from you
If you would like to know more about how the ASDC platform might accelerate your next drone data capture project, please email us at info@asdc.io and help us learn more about what you would like to achieve by filing in this form.
