Reference · Glossary

Plain-language definitions.

Words this industry uses without explaining, explained. Written for the operations head and the insurance signatory, not the aerospace engineer.

ANPR: Automatic Number Plate Recognition. A camera plus classifier that reads vehicle plates at a gate and cross-references them against a dispatch or work-order system.
Autonomous patrol: A flight path executed by the aircraft without manual piloting. Planned once, tuned during calibration, then run continuously.
BVLOS: Beyond Visual Line Of Sight. A regulated class of drone flight in India where the aircraft operates outside the pilot's direct visual range. Requires DGCA certification.
Chain of custody: The unbroken, verifiable record of who saw what, and when. The traditional guard-based version of this in Indian physical security is unreliable; the autonomous version is timestamped by the aircraft.
DGCA: Directorate General of Civil Aviation, India's civil aviation regulator. Governs drone airworthiness and operations, including BVLOS.
Dock: A fixed ground station where the aircraft returns to charge, hot-swap batteries and shelter between patrols. Rakshak's dock returns a unit to patrol in roughly 90 seconds.
Hot-swap: Replacement of an aircraft battery pack without powering down the compute or resetting the mission state.
IP54: Ingress protection rating meaning the enclosure is dust-protected and resistant to water spray from any direction — the airframe grade Rakshak targets for outdoor Indian conditions.
LiDAR: Light Detection And Ranging. A solid-state sensor that measures distance with laser pulses; used for structural imaging and obstacle avoidance.
Long-wave thermal: Infrared imaging in the 8–14 µm range that sees temperature differences instead of reflected light — the reason drones can see a person at night against cool ground.
On-board detection: Perception and classification that runs on the aircraft's own compute rather than being streamed to a cloud service. Reduces latency, bandwidth and jurisdictional risk.
Perimeter: The security boundary of a site — usually a physical fence but also, in this business, everything within the radius that a threat could cross before being detected.
VMS: Video Management System. The existing platform your security team already uses to review CCTV; Rakshak events integrate here rather than in a separate dashboard.