Hangar Technology Will Use Vapor IO’s Data Centers to Automate Drones in Kinetic Edge Cities

The partnership will work together to automate autonomous drone missions in cities across the country.

byMarco Margaritoff|
Hangar Technology Will Use Vapor IO’s Data Centers to Automate Drones in Kinetic Edge Cities
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We live in a world where more and more devices are becoming autonomous, including the drones used across industries. Hangar Technology, a drone software company wants to manage and automate unmanned aerial vehicles for enterprise customers and has decided to use Austin-based data center start-up Vapor IO to do so. Vapor IO is partnering with Hangar, because they have the data processing capabilities to handle the massive expected influx of data, as the autonomous industry expands over time.

According to Vapor IO’s press release, the idea of commercially implementing Hangar Technology’s Robotics-as-a-System (RaaS) platform using Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge data processing and edge computing isn’t just logical, but necessary. “The tens of thousands of autonomous robots being deployed by public and private organizations will require a national edge infrastructure,” said founder and CEO of Hangar, Jeff DeCoux. He’s certainly not wrong, if the general increase in autonomous vehicle technology and automated systems of all kinds continues to grow. 

As with unmanned aircraft traffic management systems being developed by dozens of aviation and tech companies, in preparation to safely manage all UAV flights simultaneously, a partnership such as this one makes rational sense. The need for fast, sophisticated data processing will become very clear, very soon, and DeCoux seems to realize that.

“As these robotics go to work, they will depend on low-latency services at the edge, including precision navigation, micro-climate decision support, and high speed ingest of data to assure safe and secure deployment,” said DeCoux. “We have been working with Vapor IO for over a year and are confident that the Kinetic Edge will meet these needs now and into the future.” 

What the fusion of these two companies will provide, specifically, is essentially the raw power to process the vast amount of data to run a whole landscape of unmanned devices, and the sophisticated software to manage the autonomous missions. 

CEO and founder of Vapor IO, Cole Crawford, considers this development to be the beginning of something all-encompassing, when it comes to autonomous data management. “Combining Hangar’s technology with Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge will create a nationwide footprint for completely autonomous drone missions, paving the way to deliver critical infrastructure for all types (of) autonomous vehicles, not just drones, but also cars and trucks," said Crawford

The press release describes the shared benefits of this nascent partnership as an economy-boosting, autonomous industry-expanding, open-source venture. According to DataCenterKnowledge, the first Vapor IO edge data center will be housed in Chicago, with plans for eight additional cities to house them by the end of this year. Rhonda Ascierto, the research director of data centers and critical infrastructure of 451 Research, is profusely excited at the news of this team-up.

“The potential of this partnership is tremendous,” Ascierto said. “If Hangar’s drones are able to wirelessly transmit data to Vapor IO’s micro data centers, then that would prove hugely beneficial, particularly for applications that involve human safety. These are the types of ecosystems that will drive the success of Internet of Things.” 

Frankly, this does sound like the beginning of a new era where smart-machines process unthinkable amounts of data in cities across the country, powering fleets of autonomous drones that complete tasks around the clock. Whether that is the case or not, we’ll certainly see in the foreseeable future. Stay tuned.

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