Skylark Drones aims to unlock a sea of possibilities with Zoom

Skylark Drones is revolutionizing the way businesses make decisions by harnessing the power of drone data. Founded by two passionate engineers, Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy and Mrinal Pai, the company is creating the foundation for a global drone infrastructure. 

Eyeing the future

The fast-growing company has already served over 100 enterprise clients, processed over 1 million images, and executed over 20,000 autonomous flights through its platform. To further improve its competitiveness, the company started looking at some of the possible gaps that still existed in the drone ecosystem. 

“We have always strived to accelerate industrial productivity with actionable intelligence using drones, and have successfully discovered and productized drone applications in sectors such as mining, solar and infrastructure,” Mughilan said “However, we see a market gap in the surveillance and inspection use case which can be enabled by live broadcasting of the drone feed. 

“But what can be done if my drone is flying near a site and I want to talk to the pilot or see the live feed to have a better understanding?” Mughilan continued. “If I am in an urban location while my oil rig is in a remote location, can I see in real time what my drone is seeing and have better visibility and control?” 

As drone imagery is static, a real-time broadcasting facility enabled using drones can be extremely useful to sectors. Mughilan gave an example of a security company providing surveillance services. An organization would benefit from the aerial view that drones provide. Multiple drones could fly over a designated area and broadcast their feeds to a command center in real time. Another use case is remote inspection of assets like wind turbines or cell towers where the inspection engineer can be off site while inspecting all assets under his purview. Users can communicate in real time to the pilot flying the drone to request a closer view of defects and get the perspective they are looking for.

In order to scale its business, Skylark Drones needed a technology provider that could enable video stream access over the network, without consuming much bandwidth, and capture a recording of the video for viewing and archiving. The ability to seamlessly integrate the drone video feed using Zoom’s Video SDK and enable the off-site engineer or command center personnel to take action from the app itself was essential. Skylark required a solution that enabled its developers to build custom workflows, since every use case was different. 

The Zoom advantage

After exploring various service providers, Skylark Drones ultimately selected Zoom as its technology provider. Zoom offered a ready-to-use video streaming solution through its Video SDK, allowing Skylark’s product developers to concentrate on the specific use case at hand, rather than having to create their own live video streaming solution from scratch. This reduced time to market as well as maintenance efforts, providing a competitive advantage.

According to Mughilan, “We found Zoom’s development support and developer resources to be exceptional, with sample apps and guides making it effortless for the team to test the solution at all stages of development. They also appreciated the prompt support from the Zoom Solutions Engineering team.” 

The team further noted that the integration was smoother and more compelling than any competing video streaming solution.

Opening up future possibilities

Skylark is delighted with Zoom’s ability to handle network speed and video quality. This has opened up new possibilities for Skylark, as the team believes that building with Zoom’s Video SDK has allowed them to make significant strides in the surveillance and inspection sector. 

“Skylark will be pursuing this field more aggressively in the near future,” Mughilan said. “The future looks bright for the Skylark-Zoom collaboration, as there are numerous potential use cases, including remote inspection of assets, mining operations, crowd management, intelligence missions, and locating missing children.” 

By using Zoom’s Developer Platform solutions and resources, Skylark has been able to elevate the capabilities of its drone platform to the next level. The possibilities are limitless, and the sky’s the limit for this exciting partnership.