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Permalink Reply by Toby Mills on January 13, 2012 at 11:45am

kushal, this is a very high end platform. while the APM can fly something that big the logistics of it are going to be extremely challenging. You are into Milspec territory with these requirements. do you have any previous experience?

perhaps you can explain a little bit about your background and what you are trying to do?

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Permalink Reply by kushal on January 15, 2012 at 9:56pm

Yes we are aiming for Mil specs.

I am new to the UAV field. However I have worked on various training simulators used by defence forces.

Is it possible to use Ardu to satisfy the above mentioned criteria.

If not can you suggest some alternative.

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Permalink Reply by Toby Mills on January 15, 2012 at 10:29pm

Personally, I would say you may be better with an off the shelf commercial military solution.

The APM has not been designed with your goals in mind and while the hardware is probably capable enough there would be a lot of software development involved. By the time you spent all the money developing it, it would probably have been cheaper to buy something.
Unless of course you are looking to manufacture in large quantities, then developing on top of APM could be a great idea that could benefit the community with all of the open source software you would write and release back to the community ;)

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Permalink Reply by kushal on January 16, 2012 at 12:25am

thanks toby,

can you pls suggest some, off the shelf commercial military solution which are also cheaper and better.

thanks for the help.

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Permalink Reply by Toby Mills on January 16, 2012 at 12:39am

what country are you in, your options may be limited by export restrictions.

I'm not an expert in military UAV's

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Permalink Reply by kushal on January 16, 2012 at 1:23am

India

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Permalink Reply by Art Whaley on January 16, 2012 at 10:17am

I"m a little uncomfortable with this conversation...  

One of the forum rules here is that we don't discuss military applications of UAVs.  

If you're looking for a drone for a military or government application I really don't think a cheap open-source community developed system is the right place to start.  Every time someone posts one of those "Look, for $600.00 I did what the military spends Millions on!" posts, I want to stop and remind them that the challenges faced by a military drone are totally different than those faced by a civilian drone.  If the weather is bad, I don't have to fly my drone.  If my drone crashes on takeoff because I didn't think about every last thing...  I need to buy more styrofoam.  The worst thing my drone contends with is when I forget to waypoint around a tree...

In the military people die when your drone fails.  The basic challenge- making a chunk of electronics stay in the air - is the same... but the complexity and robustness of the solution to those challenges needs to go up a lot when lives are riding on its success and when other people are trying to shoot or jam the drone and when it's got to work day in and day out regardless of circumstances because wars very rarely get rained out...  If you're trying for a mil-spec drone you need world class aeronautic and software designers... I'm confident some people in the diydrones community are up to the challenge...  but the stuff we're flying has NOT been designed with the requirements of mil-spec operation, even if the people involved are smart enough that it could have been.  That's a totally different job, even if from the outside it looks the same.  That's why the government's drones are more expensive than ours.  

I don't want to be discouraging.  But the drone you're asking about is a huge project...  if you're intent on pursuing it yourself, you need to find out what you can legally acquire in your country, and you need to start off with simple UAVs and work your way up.  Those weight, endurance and range requirements aren't an easy mix.  There's not an off the shelf solution to this problem.  Learn to fly UAVs...  then work towards UAVs with longer endurance and range....  If you bought an airframe that could handle those weights and flights right now and dropped an ardupilot in it...  my guess is it would be smashed to bits about 10 seconds after acquiring gps lock...  There's just a lot to learn along the way to serious drones!  :)

Art

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Permalink Reply by Don Brooks on January 16, 2012 at 10:32am

As everyone else said, you're either looking in the wrong place for your solution, or looking for a something that you probably aren't quite ready to manage. If this is a personal, hobby or civilian project, then youy might want to start by watching this:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/9-reasons-why-you-should-start-...

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