Real-time location intelligence is critical for business operations. From getting real-time road data, to building asset-tracking solutions for navigating drone fleets. Today, we’re excited to highlight a customer, AirMap, whose software solutions rely on Azure Maps for real-time location intelligence in a new frontier of technology called dynamic mission planning for drones.

AirMap is the leading global airspace management platform for drones. AirMap’s Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) platform enables the deployment and operations of safe, efficient, and advanced drone operations for enterprises and drone solution providers. Since 2017, AirMap has been part of the Microsoft Ventures portfolio and has chosen Microsoft Azure as its trusted cloud for its cloud-based UTM platform. AirMap offers open, standardized APIs and SDKs that make it easy for software developers to integrate AirMap’s intelligence services and capabilities into third party applications. This includes situational awareness of flight conditions, airspace advisories, and global airspace regulations. The AirMap developer platform also offers easy access to AirMap’s global network of airspace authorities, who offer notification, authorization, and more to drone operators on the AirMap UTM platform.

Figure 1: AirMap dynamically renders polygons representing different geographic areas subject to airspace regulations.

When faced with the decision of selecting location intelligence services, AirMap didn’t have to venture far with Azure Maps offering world-class geospatial capabilities natively in Azure. This allowed for seamless, secure, and scalable integration with AirMap’s existing Azure solution.

“The speed and performance of Azure Maps is a strong complement to AirMap’s safety-critical airspace intelligence services.”

– Andreas Lamprecht, Chief Technology Officer, AirMap

AirMap utilized the vector tile service (Figure 1) on Azure Maps to create an AirMap contextual airspace plugin for Azure Maps. This plugin allows users to view and interact with AirMap’s contextual airspace advisory layers, rendered on dynamic map tiles from Azure Maps. The Azure Maps custom vector tile service supported AirMap’s high performance needs of visualizing a large data set with custom data-driven styling. The Azure intelligent cloud platform provides the ideal infrastructure for operating AirMap’s complex and real-time tracking solutions. The AirMap widget for Azure Maps enables developers to include drone-specific data and capabilities into a variety of Azure solutions, which is critical for safe drone operation. Azure Maps developers can further enrich map visualization by adding imagery captured by drones using image layers. Other Azure Maps capabilities include satellite imagery, search, and routing which can be used to implement solutions for agriculture, construction sites, insurance firms, and many other industries that will increasingly leverage drone technology.

To get started, you can install the AirMap contextual airspace plugin for Azure Maps.